


Time In A Bottle

by eftsoons



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Established relationship (kind of), F/M, Major Crises, Minor Crises, Scott and Tessa are dramatic as usual, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-04-19 09:29:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 53,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14234319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eftsoons/pseuds/eftsoons
Summary: Post-retirement, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir are really working on getting into the whole “having a normal life” thing.  When their pasts come back to haunt them, they struggle to help themselves—and each other—find the way home.





	1. A Minor-League Crisis

Scott woke up early with a crick in his neck and a swirling, nauseous sensation in the pit of his stomach.  He could feel Tess pressed against him, sweat causing their skin to stick together wherever they touched. Her breath, low and steady, fanned across his face.  Scott kept his eyes closed as he smoothed a hand up and down Tessa’s back, trying to convince himself to go back to sleep while he still had the chance.

Goddamn it, had they fallen asleep on the couch again?  Because that had been all well and good at one point, when they’d been kids and he’d had some bounce left in his step, but now it made his back throb for the whole day after.  It didn’t hurt _yet_ , strangely, but he knew that the ache had to be brewing in his bones, just waiting to appear the moment he stood up.  He seriously needed to stop saying yes when Tessa asked him to watch “just one episode” of a TV show at ten PM or he was going to be walking with a cane before he was forty.  

“Mmph,” Tessa grumbled, stretching out against him as she started to wake up in a movement that brought him precariously close to rolling off onto the floor.  Her hands fisted into his hair along the nape of his neck, then, and he could feel it as she struggled to force herself closer to him, pressing her face into his shoulder to block out the light.  Her fingers were absolutely frigid against his skin, leaving prickling goosebumps wherever they touched, and her knee was pressing right into his bladder. It was a good thing he loved her or she’d be dumped onto the floor by now.

 _“Tess,_ ” he complained, squeezing his eyes shut tighter.  

Tessa groaned, yawning against his throat.  “Hm?” she questioned, and then she very meanly jammed her cold nose into his sternum.

This was it, then, Scott thought to himself dejectedly.  Time to get up.

“Morning,” he sighed.  His hands settled at Tessa’s waist, his thumbs gliding over the slope of her hips as he leaned down to kiss her.  

Tessa stiffened against him immediately, and then her head snapped back away from him and her hands released him like she’d been burned.

“You okay, T?” Scott questioned, squinting blearily at her.  He smoothed his hands up and down her arms, trying to calm her, and looked down helplessly into the mess of her red hair.  

Wait.  Red hair.   _Red._

“Tess?” he tried again, fighting to keep the panic out of his voice.  

Tessa looked up at him, her eyes wide and her nose scrunched up tight with confusion, and Scott felt it hit him like a ton of bricks.  “Tessa, how…”

Before he could get the words out, Charlie White was barging into the room, loud as always.  “Rise and shine, Scotty!” he crowed. “It’s a brand new day out there!”

He made it around the back of the couch, took one look at Scott and Tessa pressed up against each other, nude from the waist up, and slapped a hand over his eyes with a yelp.

“Jesus, guys, I so did _not_ wanna see that.  ‘Partner bonding’ my ass.  Your girlfriend’s gonna _murder_ you, Scott.”

“Charlie?” Scott questioned, absolutely floored.  “What...how are you...my _girlfriend?_ ”  He tugged the blankets higher around their bodies, trying to shield Tessa’s upper half as he simultaneously struggled to process teenage Charlie and red-headed Tess and this whole insane situation.

“Yeah, asshole, your girlfriend,” Charlie drawled.  “Em, remember her?”

“Emily,” Scott stated quietly, things beginning to slot further into place.  

At the sound of that name coming from his mouth, Tessa couldn’t stop her full-body flinch any more than Scott could help his immediate need to wrap his arms tighter around her, pulling her closer to his chest.  

“Well,” Scott stated flatly, “Pretty sure things aren’t looking end-game with Em, anyway.”  He realized that he was being too mean to be talking about his supposed girlfriend, but Tessa was his _actual_ girlfriend and he was much more inclined to not upset _her_.  The hand that had been sitting high on Tessa’s back came up to tug at the ends of her hair, wrapping it around his fingers.  

He could feel the way Tessa reacted, the way her body relaxed back into his as she hid her smile against his collarbone.  Her smugness felt a little unreasonable considering that they’d been making breakfast in their shared apartment and talking about getting a dog at this time yesterday, but Scott took what he could get.

“Hey, Charlie,” Scott said, surprised at the way his voice cracked, “Do you think you could give us a minute?”

“Uh, yeah,” Charlie replied, still looking shell-shocked.  “Take, like, twenty minutes if you want, man. Just...keep it down.  Meryl’s still asleep.”

Scott could feel his cheeks get hot at the implication, and Tessa curled even more tightly into his chest—truly hiding, now.  

“Thanks,” he said, and then he waited with bated breath as Charlie slumped back out of the room and closed the door behind him.  

The second the door clicked shut, Scott was launching himself up from the couch and to his feet, his eyes wide.  Around him, the room was unfamiliar, someplace he couldn’t recall ever having been before. The furniture was old, the walls smelled like mildew, he was wearing a pair of boxers he hadn’t seen since high school, and Tessa was there in front of him, teenaged and half-naked and very clearly freaking out.  Where the hell was he? _When_ the hell was he?  What the _actual fuck_ was going on?

Tessa blinked up at him in shock, her breath caught in her throat and her face going bright red.  Scott took a moment to look at her, taking her in. He kept his gaze above the shoulder—she could be like fifteen for all he knew, christ—but he couldn’t help getting stuck on her face, tracing the softness of her cheeks and the clean line of her nose.  He loved Tessa at twenty-nine, obviously, and she only got more beautiful to him every day, but sometimes he wished he’d had more time with her in the early days, back when he’d just been falling in love with her and she’d still been caught somewhere in the back half of puberty, nervous and wide-eyed and so heartbreakingly sincere.

As he continued to stare, slack-jawed, he realized that Tessa’s expression had started to crumple, her eyes filling with tears.

“Oh Tess,” he couldn’t help but sigh.  He crouched back down and wrapped her up in a fearsome hug.  “You’re okay, kiddo.”

But she wasn’t okay, clearly, because it only took half a second after he got his arms around her for her to start crying.  Her fingers dug painfully into his sides as she clutched him tight and sobbed into his shoulder, her tears hot and wet on his skin.  

Scott rubbed his hands up and down her back, soothing her as best as he could.  “You’re okay,” he repeated, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “It’s okay, T.  It’s okay.”

Tessa calmed down quickly, her tears slowing and her breaths getting more even.  Scott knotted the back of one hand into her hair and kept her pressed tightly to him with his other arm, trying to avoid the pained expression he knew he’d see on her face.

“What are we doing, Scott?” Tessa questioned after a minute.  Her voice was soft and watery, and it made Scott’s stomach churn to hear it.

“Nothing wrong,” Scott was quick to reassure her, without even stopping to think about what might have happened.  He remembered having what felt like hundreds of these conversations between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, each one etched indelibly into his memory; he knew the way her heart was probably pounding out of her chest, the guilt that was eating her up inside, and above all the fear that they’d somehow broken things between them in a way that couldn’t be fixed.  But Scott now had the benefit of knowing that things worked themselves out in the end, and that made all the difference. “I promise, we didn’t do anything wrong. We’re fine, T.”

“We still shouldn’t have done that,” Tessa whispered, her cheeks still hot.  “Our skating has to come first.”

Her arms were clenched tightly over her chest, covering herself as best as she could, and it was clear that she was uncomfortable.  Scott turned his head and peered around the room, trying to track down where her shirt could have gone. He didn’t have any luck, so instead he reached over for the blanket they’d been sleeping under and wrapped it around her like a shawl, trying to give her what little privacy he could.  “It’s okay,” Scott said definitively. “If you want to forget it, then we will. I promise. Nothing has to change, Tess.”

Tessa shook her head, staring Scott right in the eyes.  “But it _does_ change things,” she insisted.

“Maybe,” Scott admitted.  He raised a hand slowly, telegraphing the movement so that Tessa could pull away if she wanted, and smoothed his fingers through her hair.  “But we’ll talk through it, okay? I love you, T. And I’ll always want to skate with you; _that_ isn’t going to change.”

Tessa nodded, solemn.  “I love you too,” she replied.  Her fingers played with the edges of the blanket as she studied Scott with a careful eye, tracing the lines of his face.  The examination took a while, and Scott could feel himself start to sweat under her gaze. “You’re acting weird today,” she decided.

“Yeah?” Scott asked stupidly, trying to buy himself some time.

“Yeah,” Tessa said, tilting her head just a hair to the side as she thought.  “You’re acting...different.”

And shit, _yeah_ Scott was acting different, obviously, because he was a thirty-one year old who was trapped in the body of a high schooler.  But what the hell was he going to say to Tessa about it?

Well, he could always just go with the flow and pretend to be teen-Scott until this whole thing worked itself out somehow.  It couldn’t be _that_ hard; he’d been a teen, once, even if it felt like a lifetime ago, so he could most likely fumble his way through.  But that meant lying to Tessa, which was a terrible idea in general but an especially terrible idea _now_ , considering that she’d just made out with past-him for (probably?) the first time and she really needed the version of him who remembered that experience in order to talk about it.  Also, on a more fundamental level Scott just hated lying to T—full-stop, ever, under any circumstances—because she could always see right through him and her disappointment when she figured it out always made him feel like absolute shit.

So that left option two, telling Tessa that he was a man from the future who was somehow trapped in his past self’s body.  This, of course, was probably an equally bad idea (if not a worse one) because there was no way to explain the situation that made Scott sound sane.  

If he were Tessa, he’d probably make a pros and cons list to figure out which decision would be smarter.  But he _wasn’t_ Tessa, and his partner was waiting for him to say something to her while he sat there with a constipated look on his face, and he already knew what he _wanted_ to do in his gut.   _Fuck it_ , he thought to himself.

“Something _is_ different with me today,” Scott admitted finally, letting out a long sigh.  

“Yeah?” Tessa asked, patiently waiting for him to continue.  She was looking at him with these big, wide, empathetic eyes, like she trusted him more than anyone in the world.

“Yeah,” Scott said.  “I feel like I’m going crazy here, T.  I gotta ask you something, and you have to promise not to tell anyone, okay?”

“I promise,” Tessa said without so much as a moment’s hesitation.  She tucked the blanket under her armpits so that she could free up her hands, and then she was pulling him into her easily, her cheek pressed calmly against the shoulder she’d been crying into only minutes before.

Scott tightened his grip on her hair, so full of love for her in that moment that he felt like his heart would burst.  “Tessa,” he started, “How old are we?”


	2. A Man With No Plan

_Scott tightened his grip on her hair, so full of love for her in that moment that he felt like his heart would burst.  “Tessa,” he started, “How old are we?”_

 

Tessa’s head snapped up, and then she was glaring at him with dark, narrowed eyes, the warmth completely drained from her face.  “Stop it, Scott,” she demanded. Her voice was dark and deadly calm, an early variant of the tone she would later use when she wanted to say _I am so mad at you that I have past the point of screaming._  “You aren’t funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny,” Scott replied anxiously.  He raised his hands in front of his chest, miming innocence.  For a moment, he questioned whether or not it was actually a good idea to drag Tess into this, and he even thought about playing it off as a teenage-Scott-is-an-asshole moment.  But Tessa was his partner, he needed her help, and he’d already committed to the no-lying plan. So instead he took a deep breath and mentally prepared himself for whatever judgment Tessa was going to make.  “I have no idea how old we are,” he said, “Or where we are, or what we’re doing here. When I fell asleep last night, I was thirty-one years old, Tess.”

Tessa studied him closely, looking at the tension that was probably written all over his face, and shook her head.  Scott knew the words that were about to come out of her mouth before she said them: “Prove it.”

Scott sighed and pressed his forehead against the couch between Tessa’s knees, a headache pounding under his temples, as he tried to wrack his brain for something she would believe.  There were a lot of facts he knew about Tess that he hadn’t known in high school, some of which would get him slapped much more easily than they’d get Tessa to believe he was a time-traveler.  Many others simply wouldn’t be enough. He had thousands of small tidbits of Tessa stored away––the familiar sound of her voice as it echoed from across a rink, the look of amazement on her face when she saw the Paris skyline, the thrum of her pulse against his chest as their breathing fell into a singular rhythm–but none of them were what he needed.  They’d lived side by side for so long that it felt like there was almost too much to sort through.

Finally, it dawned on him: “I stood you up for dinner,” Scott blurted out, before the thought had fully completed in his brain.

Tessa frowned; she was still plenty angry, but now she was also confused on top of it, which was not a good omen.  “What?” she asked.

“On the first night we were in Canton,” Scott amended, peering up at her from the edge of the couch.  “You were anxious about living alone so far from home, so I promised that I’d get dinner with you on our first night in town.  But then I forgot and went out with some kids from the rink and you ate alone in your apartment and swore you’d never trust me again.”

Tessa’s face went white as a sheet, her lips pressed together.  “I didn’t tell you that,” she said, softly. “I never told anyone that.  I would remember.”

“You haven’t yet,” Scott replied.  “You won’t say anything until like six years from now, actually.”   _It comes up in therapy,_ Scott thought but didn’t add; he wasn’t trying to scare her completely shitless.  

“Oh,” she said, and Scott noted that the pitch of her voice had climbed suspiciously high.

Scott tried to look up at her––maybe to apologize for that night, or to see how she was reacting, or to try and explain just how much he really trusted her and needed her to believe him right now––but the sun coming through the window was starting to make his brain feel like it was on fire.  “Oh god,” he grumbled, squeezing his eyes shut tight. “I’m sorry, Tess. I know we’re in the middle of something, but I think I’m gonna throw up. What _happened_ last night?”

“You went shot-for-shot with Charlie,” Tessa informed him primly.  “Which I told you not to do, by the way.”

“I should’ve listened to you,” Scott grumbled, trying not to focus on the way he could literally hear the blood rushing around in his head.  “I feel like I got hit by a truck.” That was one thing explained away, at least; it was good to know that some of his disorientation was due to a massive hangover instead of getting blasted back into the past.

Tessa laughed at his reaction, the sound uncontrolled and a little panicky, and Scott couldn’t help but laugh along with her despite the ache in his bones and the pounding in his head and the sense of impending doom.  As the laughter died down, though, Scott and Tessa stared at one another very quietly, Scott still crouched in front of Tessa in her blanket-toga and Tessa’s eyes trained on him like he might evaporate into thin air if she looked away.

“You really are serious, aren’t you?” Tessa breathed. “You’re really…”

Scott nodded mutely.  He looked down at his lap, anxious, and waited as a thousand and one different thoughts ping-ponged around in Tessa’s head.

“So, how old do you think we are, again?” she asked.

“Here?” Scott quipped.  “I have no idea. Yesterday night, though, I was thirty-one and you were twenty-nine.  How old are we now?”

Tessa swallowed stiffly. She absolutely terrified.  “I’m sixteen,” she said. “You’re eighteen.”

“Sixteen,” Scott breathed, raking his hands through his hair.  “You’re sixteen?”

Tessa nodded, her eyes as wide as saucers.  

“ _Shit_ ,” Scott whispered as quietly as he could, trying to contain his freak-out before he scared his de-aged partner even more than he already had.  Internally, though, he felt like screaming and his heart was pounding, nearly beating out of his chest. It was one thing to _think_ he knew what was happening, but having it confirmed was a different matter entirely.  He was really here, trapped in the past, with no idea of where he was or how he’d arrived here, and he’d really just confessed all of that to Tessa.  And now, having probably just messed _that_ up beyond belief, he had absolutely no plan of any kind whatsoever!  

His limbs were suddenly vibrating with restless energy, and Scott ignored the vertigo that made his vision go briefly sideways as he stood up to pace.  “This is not good,” he ground out, and it felt like the understatement of the year.

Tessa, meanwhile, had gone eerily still, which meant that she was doing either much better or much worse than he was.  Only her eyes followed Scott as he moved, and she clutched the blanket to her chest like a lifeline. “Scott,” she said, sounding far too level-headed.

Scott stopped mid-step to turn toward his partner.  “Yes?”

“We need a plan.  But you told Charlie to give us a minute and it’s already been at least ten.  So we need to focus.”

Tessa’s quiet, frank voice worked wonders to ease the tightness in Scott’s chest.  “You’re right,” he agreed. He wanted to say more, to thank her and hug her for somehow managing to take this all in stride when he could barely deal with it, but Tessa was already moving on.

“What’s the last thing you remember before waking up here?” she asked him.

“Us, cooking dinner at the apartment,” Scott clipped out as he continued to pace.  “We ate on our couch, watched Pride and Prejudice, and dozed off. And then I woke up and I was here, like this, wherever we are now.”

“We’re at Charlie’s uncle’s,” Tessa informed him.  “For spring break.”

Scott frowned, even more confused than he’d been before.  “Spring break,” he said blankly.

“Yes.  Marina gave us the week and Charlie invited us, so we went.  Why?”

“We never went anywhere with Charlie for spring break,” Scott responded.  “He invited us, but we didn’t go.”

“Well you must have gone,” Tessa pointed out, “If you’re just Scott but older.  Are you _absolutely sure_ you didn’t come here?”

Scott laughed, nodding.  “I’m sure alright,” he replied.  “We had a fight about it, Tess.  You said that you wanted to go but only if I would come with you, I said no, and then we drove the whole way back to Ilderton in dead silence.”

“Maybe it isn’t safe to assume that you’re just the older version of Scott, then,” Tessa considered.  She stood up to pace, as Scott had been only moments before, and Scott watched her trace over the same path he had as she worked through her thoughts.  “If this is different, then other things could be too. We should compare timelines to see what else has changed. But we don’t have time for that now...we’ll have to do it tonight.”

Scott nodded in agreement but didn’t say anything, afraid of interrupting Tessa while she was still pacing back and forth and obviously deep in thought.

“For now, we just need to figure out how to get you through the day—since Meryl and Charlie can’t know about this, obviously.” She finally stopped moving to stand in front of Scott, her hands folded tightly together in front of her.

“Obviously,” Scott agreed.  “So, why don’t you tell me how we got here?”

“Charlie invited us after practice a couple weeks back back and we said yes,” Tessa started. “Yesterday, we all came up from Canton to Skanee, where we are now; Charlie and Meryl took a separate car into town and arrived first, you and I drove together in your truck, and we met at the house around eight last night.  Then we got drunk in the living room and…Meryl and Charlie went to bed...we stayed up a bit longer…and then we woke up here.”

Scott nodded, carefully avoiding Tessa’s obvious blush as she finished speaking. “How long are we supposed to be staying?” Scott asked.

“Five days,” Tessa replied.  “We’re going back to Canton on Saturday.”  

“Huh,” Scott said, taking the information in.  “Anything else I should know?”

“I don’t think so,” Tessa said, but her voice turned up at the end and made the sentence into a question instead of a statement.  “It’s hard to think about what else I need to tell you, though. Maybe you should describe how your version of this spring break happened so that we can compare.”

“Sure,” Scott said.  Tessa’s hands were going a bit white at the knuckles, so he pried them delicately apart and took her right hand between both of his, giving it a squeeze as he continued.  “Charlie invited us on a bad training week,” he said, although that was something of an understatement. “Things weren’t going well for us either on or off the ice, and we were both in a foul mood. You wanted to fix it by getting us to spend some time together away from the rink, but I wanted some time apart to cool off.”

“Hm,” Tessa said, frowning.  “That’s strange.”

“Strange how?  Why did we say yes?”

“Charlie asked us on a _good_ training week,” she admitted.  “We were doing unusually well, so it seemed like an easy decision.  We both thought it would be fun to have a few days together together off the ice.”

Scott nodded, considering.  He remembered how rare and beautiful good training weeks had seemed back then, those long strings of days when everything finally lined up and he and Tessa felt themselves falling perfectly into sync.  He could imagine how, in that headspace, he would’ve wanted to spend more time with Tess instead of going home; he always got greedy when things went well for them, trying to stretch the feeling for as long as it would last.

“Well that makes sense, then,” he said, finally.  “But it doesn’t explain why that week was different for you than it was for me.”

“Or why you’re here,” Tessa added.

Scott nodded. “Or why I’m here. What else was even going on around this time?” he wondered absently, speaking mainly to himself.  He wanted to start pacing again but he also didn’t want to let go of Tessa’s hand, so he settled for shifting his weight from foot to foot as he continued to hang on.  He tried to sort through his memories, but this was so long ago; everything felt fuzzy.

“Nothing, really,” Tessa responded.  “Just the usual. Going to school, training…” She let her voice trail off then, leaving room for Scott to fill in the blanks.

He didn’t remember the details anymore, but he certainly remembered the feeling of what it had been like at this stage; they’d still been smarting from missing the Olympics in Torino, and they’d felt like they had something to prove.  As a result, they’d started training more intensely––longer hours, and a lot more seriously. It had made the rest of their lives into a monotonous slog, and they had been so caught up in their work that it would’ve been boring if it hadn’t also been exhausting beyond belief.  It had been the first time they’d felt like every waking hour had to be accounted for, and neither of them had dealt particularly well with the self-inflicted stress.

“How am I doing with you?” Scott asked, the words coming out before he could overthink them.  He knew he was probably de-railing their focus, but he couldn’t help it.

“What?” Tessa asked, quirking an eyebrow.  “What do you mean?”

“Am I…” Scott paused to shake his head, trying to cast away thoughts of how much he was about to sound like his mother.  “Am I being nice to you?” he finished finally, somehow managing to hide his grimace.

Tessa smiled at him, reaching her free hand up to give his cheek a brief pat.  “You’re doing just fine, _dad_ ,” she joked, laughing.

Scott winced for real, then, feeling embarrassed.  God, he really _was_ old enough to be her father right now, he thought; he was almost _twice_ her age.  And here he was, half naked and toe-to-toe with her as he latched onto her for reassurance like a schoolboy.

Tessa, intuitive as always, immediately rushed to course correct.  “Really, Scott, we’re fine,” she told him, a bit more sincerely.  She brought her other hand up to clutch his, twining their fingers together like she knew exactly what had been running through his head.  “You’re...quiet...but it’s okay. We’re both just really focused right now.”

“Okay, that’s good.  That’s good,” Scott sighed, trying to let his anxiety go.  His thumb glided absently over Tessa’s, comforting them both.  “Is there anything else you think I need to know for today?”

“Not much,” Tessa told him.  “I’ll try to help you if something comes up, but we should be okay until tonight, I think.”

Scott nodded.  “What are we supposed to be doing?”

“Hiking,” Tessa informed him with a grin.  “You’re driving us to Point Abbey; you looked up the route for us yesterday.”

“And I remember exactly none of that,” Scott replied, chuckling.

“I do,” Tessa reassured him.  “I’ll give you directions. And bring a map.”

“Thanks, T,” Scott said, smiling gratefully back at Tessa.  Even with everything so different, at least this was familiar.  They were a team; they’d figure everything out together, like always.  They’d develop a plan and he’d get back to _his_ Tessa and she’d get _her_ Scott back, and it would all be fine.  

But then Scott made the mistake of let himself look at Tessa for too long, and his guilt quickly began to mount again as he realized that this whole plan hinged on putting a massive burden of responsibility onto his (very young) partner’s shoulders.  What if Meryl and Charlie figured out that something was off with Scott and called him on it? What if Scott couldn’t figure this out before the end of the week and they had to go back to Canton like this? What if they _never_ figured this out and Tessa was stuck here with him forever, trapped in her Scott’s body?  What would happen to his Tessa, back in the future, or to the Scott that was supposed to be here in the past? What was happening to them _right now?_  It was overwhelming to think about how many possible ways there were to screw this up––and how many ways he might have screwed this up already.

Scott released his grip on Tessa’s fingers to take her face in his hands and touch their foreheads together, suddenly desperate to ground himself.  He could hear Tessa’s breath shudder in her chest, soft and fluttering. “Sorry,” Scott muttered, even as he pressed his forehead more tightly to hers, squeezing his eyes shut.  “Just...give me a second.”

“Okay,” Tessa agreed.  If she was concerned by Scott’s rapidly-changing mood, she didn’t do anything to show it, just letting him step into her personal space and cling to her. Her voice was young and trusting and the sound of it made Scott feel like he’d rather tear his own arms off than ever do anything to hurt her again for the rest of his life.  It was unsettling, how borderline-paternal that instinct felt. He was having a lot of odd feelings right now, honestly: protectiveness, because seeing her this young made him remember his promise to always look after her and as every time he’d ever broken it; frustration, because he felt like he was too full of regret and fear and anxiety to deal with this whole situation; and love, of course, because she was still Tessa and he was only human.  

Scott took a deep, audible breath in, trying to encourage her to sync her breathing to his.  They wouldn’t start doing this for a few years, probably––not until after her first surgery, and not consistently until after Vancouver––but she still responded intuitively, her breaths aligning with his after a few cycles.  Tessa’s arms came up to wind around Scott’s neck, the touch so light that he could barely feel it, and Scott let his hands settle against Tessa’s waist. The longer they stayed like that, the more relaxed Scott became, and eventually the panic receded totally and he started feeling more like himself.

“We should get going,” he said after a while, “Or Meryl and Charlie are going to start to get worried about us.”  

Tessa nodded, but instead of pulling away she just tipped her head to the side and tucked it into Scott’s shoulder, her arms locking in a tighter grip around his neck.  Scott raised one hand to smooth back Tessa’s hair and focused on keeping his breathing low and steady, jarred by Tessa’s reluctance to pull away. They took a few more deep breaths in tandem, and Scott could feel the way Tessa’s chest shuddered on each exhale.

“You’re right,” Tessa agreed finally, squeezing him even tighter for a second before letting go entirely.

Scott took a few steps back, giving Tessa some space. “We should grab some clothes,” Scott realized. “Do you know where our bags are?”

Tessa didn’t answer, her eyes screwed tightly shut.  Her throat was working like she was swallowing down something unpleasant; it was an expression he’d seen one too many times.  

“You okay, T?” Scott asked.

“Fine,” Tessa said.  Her voice was low and strangled.  “It’s just...you’re being really sweet right now and I’m just…”

“Aw, Tessa,” Scott said, guilt all but punching him in the stomach.  

Tessa laughed, swiping at her eyes with the back of one hand.  “Can you just insult me real quick or something?” she questioned, turning her big wet eyes up at him and pasting on a smile.  “Then I’ll be all set to go.”

“Not a chance, kiddo,” Scott responded fiercely.  He moved quickly back toward Tessa and pulled her into a bone-crushing hug.  Tessa’s blanket-toga pressed between them, lumpy and awkward, and the feeling of it only made Scott want to squeeze Tessa harder.  “Not a chance in hell.”

“I think getting old turned you soft,” she accused, her voice muffled by his chest.  

“Maybe so,” Scott hummed; he was privately pleased that she thought so.  “Now c’mon. Let’s get ready for the day, huh?”

“Okay,” Tessa agreed.  Then she surprised him by tilting back and pressing a hard, quick kiss to his cheek before letting go.  

Scott felt his stomach flip, filled with nervousness and happiness like he was actually eighteen and this was the first time she’d ever kissed him.  It was a weird, fleeting thought, but he felt suddenly overcome by the need to tell _his_ Tessa about it like a kid gushing over a middle school crush. He wanted his partner here with him so that he could describe how much her younger self trusted him even though he didn’t deserve it and how he felt like he loved both versions of her impossibly more now than he had at eighteen.  

He brushed the feeling aside as best as he could, but there was something about it that stuck to his bones and stayed there anyway, pulling at his heart.


	3. And The Tables Turn

Scott’s first thought, upon waking up to the feeling of a familiar mouth on his in a dark room, was that he must still be drunk.  The sensation was barely there before it was gone, the kiss dry and quick and familiar. Scott reached up instinctively, trying to prolong the moment, but he was too slow and he only managed to catch a bit of empty air as she pulled away.

“Go back to sleep, Scott,” Tessa commanded, her voice firm but surprisingly sweet.

“Mmph,” Scott agreed, only half awake.  He rolled over, throwing an arm over his eyes to block out the first wisps of early morning light, and was asleep again within seconds.

A few hours later, Scott was woken by a throbbing sensation that radiated all the way down his spine.  His throat felt dry and sore and his own sweat was causing his skin to adhere to the couch below him, but his head felt clearer than he would have expected.  He tried to stretch out, but the sensation only aggravated the twinging pain in his back, so he froze with his arms halfway over his head and then slumped back to the sofa with a sigh.  He wondered groggily where Tessa was; the half-memory from earlier this morning felt more like a dream than a reality, and he didn’t know whether to trust it.

God, Scott thought, a cup of coffee sounded like heaven right now.  And if he was thinking that, then Tessa could probably use a cup too, wherever she was, although Scott was not looking forward to the conversation that was sure to follow once she’d been adequately caffeinated.  Realizing that he would eventually have to make his way to the kitchen, Scott opened his eyes with a sigh and pulled himself up to sitting.

Immediately, he regretted it—and not just because being upright made his spine felt like it was trying to tear itself out of his back and make a break for it.

Scott was ninety-seven percent sure that he had fallen asleep in his boxers on an ugly blue futon at Charlie’s uncle’s lake house.  Now, he was completely naked on a white leather couch in a room that he had never seen before in his life. It looked like something out of a minimalist interior decorating magazine, like an alien had been given a brief description of a living room and then made to replicate it.  Every single piece of furniture was either white or glass and immaculately clean: there were two white linen chairs, the white couch he was lying on, and a long glass coffee table that sat atop a white-and-cream patterned rug. The table had nothing on it except for the remote to the massive TV that hung above the fireplace.

Facing off to Scott’s right was an open window that seemed to be looking out onto a bustling city street; the sound of traffic and a stale mid-morning light filtered softly in.  It was the only cluttered space in the room, about twenty potted plants jammed shoulder-to-shoulder along the sill interspersed with a few framed photos that were too far away to make out.

“What the hell,” Scott whispered, feeling like he would disturb the plants or shatter the coffee table or something if he raised his voice any more.  He was so disoriented that it almost felt like he’d been drugged, but he needed to figure out where the hell he was and how he’d arrived here. And he needed to do it fast.

First, though, he needed to find some clothes because it was fucking freezing in this apartment.  There were a few items strewn across the arm of one of the chairs, he noticed, but they were clearly not his—a green lace bra, a matching pair of panties, and black-and-white striped dress—and he didn’t even want to think about who they belonged to at this moment or he might explode.  There _was_ a (white) throw blanket draped along the back of the couch behind him, though, so he grabbed that and wrapped it around himself in absence of anything better to use.

Checking out the photos he’d noticed earlier sounded like as good a place to start as any so Scott, now safely ensconced in his blanket burrito, shuffled over to the windowsill and crouched down to peer at them.  The one closest to the front was a candid shot of him and Tess on the ice, midway through a lift. He didn’t recognize Tessa’s white dress or her dark-dyed hair, and he was positive that she’d never done that lift before in her life because he had absolutely no memory of it.  Tessa wasn't the only one in the photo who looked curiously different; in the photo, Scott noticed that his hair was dyed dark like Tessa's and that there was a subtle, unfamiliar sharpness to his face and body, noticeable even with the way his head tilted down.

The rest of the photos were equally startling.  There was a picture of him and Tess with Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon in a restaurant, arms looped around one another like old friends; a shot of his mother and Tessa’s mother seated together behind a bar, looking far too old; a photo of Tessa and him and all of their siblings on a lake, clutching hockey sticks and grinning broadly; a grainy image of Tessa, hair dark and eyes creased with smile lines, pressing a kiss to his cheek below the Eiffel Tower while an older, vaguely-familiar version of his face grinned into the camera.  

After he saw _that_ photo, Scott had to stop and sit down against the wall for a moment, his head spinning.  What the hell was going on, here? Where was he? He felt caught between wanting to open his mouth and scream until his lungs gave out out and wanting to flop to the ground and sleep for the next twenty years.  

Instead, he pulled himself to standing and, on a sudden hunch, made his way down the hall opening doors until he came across a bathroom.  He flipped on the light, and then adrenaline began to course through him as he leaned forward on the vanity to squint at himself in the mirror.  A sharp, angular face stared back at him, the color of his eyes and the angle of his features set against a harsh new backdrop. He stroked a hand disbelievingly down his jaw, horrified; the face staring back at him, with crows’ feet creeping out from the corners of its eyes and prominent five o’clock shadow, looked more like his brother Charlie than himself.

 _I am in such deep shit,_ he realized in a sudden bolt of inspiration.

And then, as though triggered by that thought alone, there was the sound of tumblers turning in a lock, a door swinging open, and then Tessa’s voice echoing through the apartment.  

“Scott!” she called out.  Scott could hear the sharp sound of heels striking the hardwood floor, getting closer by the second.  “Are you still home?”

Scott held his breath, his throat going completely dry.  He felt like he was about to pass out, and he was suddenly overcome by the desire to crawl under the sink and hide.  Instead, he pulled the blanket up closer to his chin and squared his shoulders. “Yep!” he called out, his voice coming out as little more than a rasp.

The clicking-heels sound got louder, and then suddenly Tessa was standing there in front of him—not his Tessa, with her soft eyes and her shy smile, but the dark-haired version of her Scott had seen in the pictures.  In that moment, though, he was so relieved to see _any_ Tessa at all that it hardly mattered; just standing there looking at her worked wonders on his frayed nerves, and for a moment he was afraid that he was going to start crying with relief.

She regarded him with a quirked eyebrow and a knowing smirk, her hands on her hips.  “That’s quite the look,” she quipped, and her eyes took on an almost predatory sharpness as she stared at him in his ridiculous improvised outfit.

“Thanks,” Scott replied, not sure what else to say.  The sight of his partner, mature and commanding and confident, standing in front of him in a full suit and looking at him like she was about to eat him alive, was simultaneously the most attractive and the most terrifying thing he’d ever seen in his life.  

Tessa laughed and walked into the room, seemingly unaware of his distress.  “Did you enjoy your extra beauty rest this morning, coach?” she asked. Thoughtlessly, she stepped forward and into his personal space, lacing her fingers behind his neck and bringing them together, chest to chest.  

Scott opened his mouth to answer, but apparently the question had been rhetorical because Tessa leaned in before he could say anything and shut him up with a kiss.  

It was awful to say, considering how anxious he was feeling and the fact that she was unknowingly doing this with the wrong man, but it somehow still managed to be the best kiss Scott had ever had.  Tessa kissed with the precision and finesse of a confident lover, anticipating exactly what Scott would want before he had the chance to want it. She fisted her hands into his hair and grazed her thumb over the shell of his ear and took his bottom lip between her teeth, biting down just hard enough to sting.  

Scott, meanwhile, kissed back with all the passion and nervousness of someone who was batting way above his average and desperate not to fuck it up.  He gripped Tessa’s hip with one hand and smoothed his other hand up her back over her dress shirt, all while dimly aware that his fingers were beginning to shake.  It was electrifying and overwhelming but it was also intuitive in a way that Scott could never have anticipated, and for a moment he forgot himself entirely, lost in sensation.

But then Tessa slipped her tongue into her mouth with the ease of someone who had clearly done this before, and then suddenly everything hit him at once and it became too much.  Scott jerked back in a panic, his heart hammering out of his chest, and he could feel it as his body started to hyperventilate.

“Scott?” Tessa questioned, looking concerned.  Her mouth was swollen and her lipstick was smeared, which meant that it was probably all over Scott’s face.

“Sorry, Tess,” he apologized, although he had no idea what he was actually trying to apologize for.  He felt like a wild animal, frenzied and backed into a corner. “Sorry, sorry, I…” He had to stop, dizziness overwhelming him, and he plopped himself down on the toilet as his vision swam.  

Tessa moved quickly in front of him, raising the back of her right hand to his forehead to check for a fever.  “Are you feeling sick?” she asked.

Scott shook his head no.  A prickling sensation began to form behind his eyelids, and he squeezed his eyes tightly shut to keep the tears at bay.  Distantly, he could feel Tessa’s hands against his head, her fingers carding through his hair in an attempt at comfort. He didn’t know whether it made him want to to jerk away or press closer so he just stayed where he was, holding himself completely still as he focused on slowing his breathing.  

When he finally managed to pry his eyes open some indeterminable length of time later, Tessa was crouched in front of him and her expression was carefully blank as she scanned over his face.  “Scott, are you okay?” she asked. “You’re scaring me a little.” Her hands had dropped to his knees, holding on with a sure, easy grip.

“I don’t know, Tess,” Scott admitted, shaking his head.  The expression of compassion and concern that immediately overtook her face was so familiar that it hurt to see, and he had to close his eyes again.  “This is crazy. This whole thing is crazy. I’m going insane, I swear to god.”

“Look at me, Scott,” Tessa pressed, somehow managing to sound soothing and commanding at the same time.  She squeezed his knees as she spoke, making it impossible for him to focus anywhere else. “What’s crazy? What’s going on?”

Scott opened his eyes, unable to deny her, and tried to answer.  But the second he looked at her it was like all the air had been pushed right out of his body.  Panic bubbled up in his chest, and he had just enough time to reach forward and pull her into him before he burst into tears.


	4. The Case For An MRI

Less than an hour later, Scott found himself perched at the breakfast bar sipping a cup of herbal tea as he watched Tessa pace back and forth on the other side of the kitchen counter.  It had taken Scott a few minutes to compose himself after his breakdown in the bathroom, but from that point Tessa had taken over and everything had gone forward with astounding efficiency.  Tessa had picked casual clothes for both of them to change into—leggings and a pull-over for her and sweatpants and a sweatshirt for Scott—and then she had ushered Scott into the kitchen and put a kettle on.  By the time the water had started to boil, Tessa had already dragged the entire story out of him.

Which, of course, was why she was now pacing.  She wasn’t saying anything out loud, but her expression kept changing as she walked, and her lips moved every now and again, too, mouthing words to herself.  It made Scott anxious just watching her—but not as nervous as he became when she suddenly stopped and whirled to face him, her eyes clamping onto his and holding fast.

“I’m taking you to the ER,” Tessa announced.  Her tone was steely, not even bothering with the illusion of pleasantness.  She was a tour de force; despite being stocking-footed and frizz-haired and flushed at the cheeks, she still managed to seem even more formidable than she had been earlier when she’d been looming over Scott in the bathroom in her business clothes.  Scott felt like he was about to melt into the upholstery under the strength of her gaze.

And god if that didn’t royally piss him off.  

Before he knew it, he was shaking his head, his arms folding protectively over his chest as though shielding himself from a blow.  “Why?” he asked, beligerent.

“Scott,” Tessa sighed, and with that single word her expression crumpled from something terrifying into something completely, heartbreakingly afraid.  “You don’t remember anything from the past thirteen years; obviously something is wrong. You could have a concussion. You could have a blood clot in your brain. You could have a tumor. You could have...well, I don’t even want to start going down the list because there are are a _lot_ of things that could be wrong.  We need to get you help as soon as we can.”

Scott blinked back at Tessa, feeling like he was having emotional whiplash.  He’d been so ready to get upset with her for bossing him around, and now it turned out that she’d just been scared and trying to hide it.  He extended an arm out toward her, not really understanding what he needed but knowing beyond a doubt that he needed it from her.  Tessa stepped forward and slid her hand into his, her palm warm and familiar, and he relaxed.

“I’m okay, T,” Scott said, wanting her to believe it.  “I promise.”

“Did you not hear me when I was beginning the laundry list of things that could be wrong with you?” Tessa asked, quirking an eyebrow.  Her face had gone back to something eerily neutral and Scott was trying hard not to hold it against her, instead focusing on the way she let her thumb slide in gentle circles over the back of his hand.

“I did,” Scott replied.  “But I don’t _feel_ like anything’s wrong.  My head doesn’t hurt, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t hit it on anything.  And I don’t feel...bad...at all. I’m mentally all here, I’m pretty sure.”  The more he spoke, the more certain he felt about it: Tessa had to be wrong about what was going on here.  There wasn’t a sense of loss, or a sense of having misplaced something—other than his glory days, maybe, since all the aches and pains of this body were decidedly _not_  signs of a man in his prime.  He wasn’t forgetting anything because there was simply nothing there to forget in the first place.  He didn’t know how or why he felt so certain, but he did. He knew it deep in his bones: he was eighteen, his body was thirty-one, and that was all.

Tessa, however, was not convinced.  “So how would you explain what’s happening here, Scott?” she asked pointedly.

“I don’t know,” Scott admitted.  “I just feel like I’m in the wrong body.  Like I’m still eighteen and I just...woke up somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be.  That’s what it feels like.”

Tessa laughed at that, and Scott felt strangely miffed.  “I’m pretty sure that’s the amnesia talking,” she informed him. “And amnesia is a symptom of a brain trauma, which means that we need to get you to the hospital and get you checked out as soon as possible so that you can start feeling better.”

Scott shook his head, more than a little hurt that Tessa didn’t believe him.  He knew that it was irrational—Tessa had logic and reason on her side whereas he only had a vague hindbrain-driven inclination to support his case—but it still stung.  He was just about to speak again, to try and get some sort of clearer explanation out, but Tessa must have anticipated him because she cut in before he had the chance.

“Scott, please just think this through with me for a minute.  If you’re right and there isn’t anything wrong with you, what will happen?  We’ll go to the hospital, do some tests that show nothing, and you’ll get to come home with no harm done.  At most, we’ll waste a few hours. But if you’re _wrong_ then you’re risking severe, permanent damage.  And a few hours’ inconvenience is _not_ worth that risk.”  

“Do you honestly think they’d let me go if they don’t find anything?” Scott retorted.  “I mean...Tess, they’d have every reason to hold me there, regardless of whether or not there’s something seriously wrong with me.  I’m a guy who has lost over a decade of his own memories. Don’t you think they’ll want to dig into that a little? I’d be trapped there from the second we walk in the door; they’d never let me leave.”

“I wouldn’t let them do that,” Tessa promised, her voice fierce and low.  Her nails dug into the back of the hand, and Scott realized that he’d almost forgotten she was holding it.  “You know I’d never let anyone do anything to hurt you.”

“Then don’t make me go, Tessa,” Scott said.  He regretted the words the moment they were out of his mouth, knowing that it was a low blow.  Scott’s heart lurched painfully as Tessa flinched back from him like she’d been slapped.

“Now that isn’t fair,” Tessa snapped, getting angry.  Selfishly, Scott was relieved by the change; the less fragile she looked, the less horrible he had to feel for going against her wishes.  “I’m only doing this for your own good and you know it.”

“I won’t go, Tess,” he said.  “If you try, I’ll leave; I’ll walk out the door right now.”  He stood, as if to make good on his threat, and Tessa immediately advanced in on him, crowding him back against the counter before he’d so much as taken a step.  Her hands fisted into his sweatshirt, latching herself to him.

“Don’t do this to me,” Tessa begged, all the fight draining out of her, and it was almost enough to break him.

“Tessa…” Scott began.  He didn’t know what else to say.  He felt like his heart was being ripped out of his chest.  

“Scott,” she replied simply.  “I love you. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if something terrible happened to you and I could’ve prevented it.”  

Scott swallowed around the lump in his throat.  He saw her point—really, he did. And he absolutely hated the thought of walking out on Tess, or of her worrying herself sick about him.  So, in a rare move, he pivoted. “How about a compromise?” he proposed.

Tessa just stared at him blankly for a moment, clearly suspicious.  “What sort of compromise?” she asked.

“We give it the night, to sleep on it,” Scott stated.  “I need a few hours to figure myself out and to figure out why I feel the way I do.  And maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow just fine and I’ll remember everything, or maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and totally agree with you, or maybe tomorrow I’ll be just the same as I feel today.  But whatever happens, if you still want to take me to the ER in the morning then I won’t fight you on it.”

“You’ll go?” Tessa checked.  “You’ll go, first thing tomorrow?”

Scott nodded solemnly, allowing himself to bask in the relief on Tessa’s face.  

“Promise me,” Tessa directed.  She squared her jaw and looked him right in the eye, her expression cold in a way that Scott was beginning to think meant she was having too many emotions to display them all at once.

“I promise,” Scott replied.

Tessa released his shirt and stepped back, and Scott felt himself breathe easier again.  “Good,” she said.

\---

Scott slept fitfully that night.

He tossed and turned, his anxiety intense enough to feel almost like motion sickness.  No matter how tightly he drew the blankets around himself, he still shivered with cold; no matter which way he shifted, his body still ached as though he was uncomfortably positioned; no matter how he sprawled out, he still felt cramped and closed in.  

His dreams came in stop-start flashes, barely there before they were gone again, and they left only the faintest impressions behind: the scent of pine trees and strawberry shampoo, the tinny sound of country music, the feeling of driving, and Tessa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a different plan for this chapter, but in the end there was no way that Tessa, a fairly rational person with a psychology background, was going to accept "I'm teen Scott visiting from the past" without some sort of protest. I'm hoping to get the next chapter out over the weekend sometime, hopefully; it's going to be a longer one!


	5. And The Pendulum Swings Back

Scott’s first thought, after he had rolled over to squint at the blaring red clock reading 12:10 AM, was _why am I in the guest bedroom?_

He actually turned back over and chewed on this for several minutes, trying to think of possible fights he’d instigated (he couldn’t recall anything major) and whether or not he’d been drunk last night (not that he could remember, which could be either a good thing or a very bad one).  Then it hit him like a bolt of lightning: he was in the _guest bedroom._  As in his apartment’s guest bedroom in Montreal.

As in _not_ Charlie’s uncle’s futon in Michigan.   _Holy shit._

Scott shot up in bed, suddenly wide awake.  “Tess!” he shouted before he could think better of it.  “Tessa!”

He swung his feet over the side of the bed and onto the floor, wincing as his toes came into contact with the chilly hardwood.  And then he was half-running out of the room and down the hall to their bedroom, tripping over his own feet as he tried and motivate his sleep-heavy limbs to move as quickly as possible.  

At the last moment, within feet of the bedroom door, he forgot about an end table that Tessa had put up and attempted to run right through it.  The top edge caught him right in the stomach, causing Scott to crumple to the floor with a groan, clutching his hip, as all the books that had been stacked on top of the table went flying every which way across the hall.  

Nothing was able to kill enthusiasm as quickly as an unexpected injury; Scott lay on his back on the floor and stared at the ceiling for a moment, reactionary tears smarting in his eyes as the bruise forming on his hip throbbed in time to his rapid heartbeat.  Then, after he’d caught his breath, he managed to scrape himself up to standing, restore the end table to rights, and finish his journey toward the master bedroom at a slightly more cautious pace.

By the time he got there, Tessa had been roused by the massive amount of noise he was making and had grudgingly propped herself up on one elbow to investigate.  “What?” she snapped, glaring at him as he cracked the door open to peek his head through. Her eyes were narrowed to angry, catlike slits, her hair was a wild mess of curls that poked up at odd angles from her head, and her right cheek was creased with lines from her pillow.  

Scott had never been so happy to see her in his life.  

Heartbeat ratcheting up again, he launched himself across the room and onto her, tackling her back against the bed.  “Tess!” he shouted, probably a little too close to her ear.

She tried to jerk back from the too-loud noise but Scott just followed her back, leaning in to grip her face in his hands and kiss her wherever he could reach—sloppy quick kisses against the corners of her mouth, her frustration-crinkled forehead, her cheeks, the tip of her nose, and everywhere in between, pausing only to laugh with happiness before diving back in again.  

“God, I missed you,” he breathed against her skin.  He all but collapsed against her, then, crushing Tessa under his body weight as he buried his head into the place where her neck met her shoulder, breathing in her comforting scent.

It had been less than twenty-four hours since he’d seen her last, but it felt like he’d been gone for years.  And that wasn’t a testament to anything about Tessa’s past self or to the stress of the situation so much as it was a testament to how lucky he was to get to have the life he did here and now in Montreal.  It felt like an achievement, in some ways harder won than any of their Olympic medals, to finally be here like this with Tessa. He’d hadn’t even allowed himself to think about wanting this for so long that it still caught him by surprise sometimes how good it was; she’d just be doing something mundane, burning food on their stove or curled up on their couch checking her email or brushing her teeth at their bathroom sink, and this sense of indescribably bone-deep calm would overtake him.  He would love Tessa in any form he could get her, of course, but he especially loved her now, after twenty-one years spent circling one another, pushing and pulling and dragging one another slowly but surely toward this point—this moment, in this place, able to be completely honest with the one person in the world who knew him better than he knew himself.

Even a few hours without that had made him feel so fucking _grateful_ for every way that his partner now understood him and loved him with such honesty that the thought of it being taken away paralyzed him with panic.

Tessa had started out by just blinked blearily in response to Scott’s enthusiasm, one hand coming up to rest limply on the back of his neck as she endured the assault.  But after he flopped down against her, the feeling of his body weight seemed to trigger something in her and she suddenly seemed to come back to herself, although not in the way Scott had expected; she went completely rigid under him, and Scott could feel her breathing pick up, hitching high and sharp in her chest.  

“Scott?” she checked, sounding caught somewhere between scared and hopeful.  The hand she’d been holding against his neck knotted tightly into the ends of his hair, and the other came to cup his cheek.  “Is that you?”

In response, Scott pushed himself back up to his elbows to hover over her, their foreheads brushing together and their noses bumping together, and then he pressed a kiss full against her lips. Tessa responded immediately and enthusiastically, and Scott closed his eyes and reveled in the way her hands roamed under his shirt, her nails gliding up and down his back with enough force to sting, as he devoted his full energy to kissing her within an inch of her life.  They broke apart several minutes later, panting like they’d just run a marathon. The amount of adrenaline suddenly pumping through Scott’s veins was unbelievable; his heartbeat pounded in his ears, too loud and too fast.

“Oh thank god,” Tessa sighed.  Their mouths were still close enough together that Scott could feel the words forming against his lips.

“Yep,” Scott said, and he leaned back in to press his mouth briefly back against hers to punctuate his statement before he flopped down against her again.

Tessa’s legs came up to hitch around his hips as he relaxed, her ankles locking around his back, and then Scott had about half a second to realize what was happening before she knocked him off balance and rolled him, flipping their positions so that Scott was pinned back against the bed and Tessa was seated on top of him.  She stared down at him from on her knees with wide, fervent eyes, and the intensity of her expression made Scott’s mouth go dry.

He reached up and smoothed his hand down her side under her pajama shirt, starting up near her ribs and ending with his thumb resting in the dip just above her hip bone.  They both let out a breath that Scott didn’t realize he’d been holding, and their eyes stayed locked together as Scott raised his other hand to mirror the position of the first on the opposite side, his fingers splayed wide over her waist and his thumbs curved in toward her middle.  He wanted to say something—anything—but he felt so choked by emotion that no words came; Tessa’s lips were parted as she looked back at him, apparently just as speechless, so the two of them sat there at a silent impasse, breathing together and staring.

“I love you,” Tessa told him suddenly.  Her pupils were blown wide, only the faintest rim of green visible, and the sharp edge of her nails bit into his skin where they rested against his chest.

Scott nodded, his tongue feeling heavy in his mouth.  There was something that felt so stupidly intense about this moment, every sensation and feeling heightened like he was feverish, delirious, or both.  He felt like he needed to get his arms around her he’d cry, but when he tried to prop himself up Tessa just leaned forward and pressed her weight into him to keep him against the bed.  Her fingers were spread wide just under his sternum, and they felt cool against his overheated skin.

“Tess,” he complained, unashamed when his voice came out whining and thin.

“Wait,” Tessa instructed him.  “I’m trying to think.” But she shifted on top of him anyway, gripping his hips tighter with her knees and sliding backwards on his lap so that she could free a hand to card through his hair.

Scott swiped his thumb back and forth over her hip, placated, and gave her the time she needed.

“Scott,” she said after a while, “How old are you right now?”

“Thirty-one,” he replied easily.  He tipped his chin down to get a better look at her face, trying to parse the mixture of relief and confusion she saw there.  “Tess, are you okay?”

Tessa shook her head to clear it, then nodded in response.  “You lost your memory yesterday,” she told him. “You thought you were eighteen.  You said that you were supposed to be in…”

“Skanee, Michigan,” Scott finished.  “I know. I know, T, because I was _there_ .  Jesus, you would _not_ believe the day I’ve had if I told you.”

Tessa blinked owlishly down at him. “What?” she snapped.

“Tess, I woke up yesterday morning _in Michigan_ , eighteen years old, on a spring break we never took.  It was the craziest experience of my life; I thought I was going insane.”

“You were actually there?” Tessa checked.  She looked like Scott could’ve knocked her over with a feather.  “With me, on that break?”

Scott nodded.  “I was there,” he replied.  “Or at least, I felt like I was.  But it was weird, Tess. We never went on that trip, right?  So it wasn’t a memory—it couldn’t have been. But you were there—well, a younger you—and it felt so real.”

Tessa took a full minute to process that statement, her face going completely blank.  Her hand had gone rigid in Scott’s hair, holding on just tightly enough to be uncomfortable.

“Tess?” Scott checked in, but Tessa said nothing and her face remained carefully neutral.

He tried to lean up again and this time Tessa let him, allowing him to sit and then to arrange her in his lap so that they were pressed together chest to chest.  He smoothed a hand up and down her back and kissed  along her hairline, and Tessa settled reluctantly into his arms, wringing her hands fitfully between them.

“I thought you had brain damage,” Tessa said suddenly.

“What?” Scott questioned.

“You,” Tessa replied, as though that was supposed to clarify things.

“Tess, what are you talking about?” Scott probed.

“Yesterday, all day, when you said you didn’t remember anything past the age of eighteen.  You told me that the last thing you remembered was the start of spring break that year after junior worlds.  I thought you’d had a stroke or a concussive injury or a mental breakdown. But you…”

“Were actually eighteen,” Scott finished, nodding.  “Yeah, I think so. I think that whatever sent me back to the past could have sent that version of me up here with you, into the future.  You and I were going to try and figure that out last night, actually, but we didn’t have the chance yet.”

Tessa took another long moment to process that, and her rapidly-turning thoughts were so obvious that Scott felt like he could almost hear them.  “What was it like?” she questioned, finally.

What _had_ it been like?  Scott thought of his original terror upon waking up that morning, his fondness and delight as he’d started getting to know Tessa’s younger self again, and the whole strange pinwheel of emotions in between.  “Surreal,” Scott decided. “I woke up on Charlie’s uncle’s futon with you half-naked on top of me; apparently, we’d just made out for the first time, while drunk, the night before.”

Tessa laughed at that, shocked out of her own thoughts just as Scott had intended.  “Oh god,” she remarked, “What a mess.”

“Yeah,” Scott agreed, “It was, in a way.  You were afraid it was going to ruin our relationship.”

“Not an unmerited fear,” Tessa quipped.  “It will, temporarily, just a bit later on.”

“No,” Scott corrected, “ _Sex_ will, a bit later on.  I’m pretty sure that a casual make-out session between friends never hurt anyone.”

Tessa laughed again at that, rolling her eyes, and she managed to fix him with a weary look.  “I would tend to disagree, but we’re getting away from the point. What happened to you while you were there?”  

“I told you what I thought was happening,” Scott started, the events of the past day already seeming like another lifetime ago.  “And you just _believed me_ like it was no big deal; you agreed to help me get back to the future and hide everything from Charlie and Meryl while we did it.  God, was that a trip by the way, seeing those two as kids again. Then we did a whole day of vacation together in Michigan: we drove to a scenic overlook out in my old truck and you and Meryl watched Charlie and I jump into Lake Superior like idiots and then we went to eat dinner at this crazy bar full of dead animals in the middle of nowhere.  You were driving us back to the house from that, actually, when I fell asleep in the truck. And then I woke up here, back in the present.”

“Interesting,” Tessa stated, and Scott would’ve laughed at the clear understatement if he didn’t know that she was already deep in thought again.

“What about your day?” he asked instead.  “What happened here in Montreal?”

“I had meetings all morning,” Tessa began, “So I didn’t realize anything was wrong until I came home for lunch.  You were standing in the bathroom when I got in, wrapped up in the throw blanket from the couch. I didn’t realize anything was wrong at first, so I tried to kiss you and you started to freak out.  I tried to calm you down as best as I could, and eventually we sat down together so that we could talk through what was going on. You told me about about what was wrong, about all the years of memories you didn’t have, and then I tried to get you to go to a doctor and you begged me to wait.  I was so worried that something terrible had happened to you, that it was _still_ in the process of happening…”

Scott smoothed his knuckles up and down Tessa’s spine, leaning in to press another kiss to her hair in reassurance.   _I’m here now_ , he wanted to tell her, _It’s alright._  But Tessa didn’t like it when he said things like that to her off the ice, so he just hugged her tighter to him and moved on.  “What then?” he asked.

“Then I made us lunch, we shared what was perhaps the strangest meal of my life, and I left for my next appointment.  Before I headed out I showed you how to use the TV and your laptop, and you promised me you wouldn’t leave the house without me or answer the door for anyone, although I was nervous whether you’d actually keep your word.  I got home at eight, we had take-out for dinner, and then we went to bed.”

“Beds,” Scott corrected with a small smile, trying to counteract the way that Tessa’s mood was beginning to get dark as she thought back on the (likely distressing) day she’d had.  Scott felt simultaneously guilt and a strong need to fix this, even as he realized that neither impulse was rational; he knew that this situation wasn’t his fault and that it was all over now, but he hated to think of how worried Tessa must have been.

“Beds,” Tessa agreed, but her voice was absent and flat, and the word sounded like an afterthought.  She bit savagely at her bottom lip, worrying the skin between her teeth, and Scott waited for her to get to whatever it was she actually wanted to say.  “This is impossible,” she told him then, as though he didn’t know that already. “None of this should be possible, Scott.”

Scott shrugged.  He knew that he should probably care about the insanity of the whole ordeal, but at this moment he actually didn’t give a shit.  He was back here with his Tessa, they were in their apartment, he was the right age, and he was just so fucking pleased about all of it that nothing else seemed important.  He knew that Tessa’s mind was running a mile a minute, trying to parse everything and come up with some reasonable explanation, but Scott was so happy and relieved and _tired_ that all he wanted to do was curl up around his favorite person in the world and go to sleep.  And then he wanted to wake up, eat breakfast, have sex, and then alternately nap, eat, and fuck until the end of time—or, perhaps more reasonably, until Tessa got stir-crazy or people started wondering where they were.

Something about this must have been legible on his face because Tessa sighed, rolling her eyes and giving him a skeptical look.  “You’re ridiculous,” she informed him exasperatedly, but the edges of her mouth were twitching up as she fought back a smile and the anxiety in her expression was beginning to give way to something warm and fond.

“Maybe I am,” Scott replied.  He curled down to press a kiss to the little furrow in her brow.  “But I’m just so relieved it’s over, Tess,” he confessed. “And so, _so_ tired.  I’m back, and we’re okay, and I just want to sleep for a week.  Can we just…go to bed and deal with this in the morning?”

“I have an early meeting tomorrow,” Tessa admitted sadly.  “We won’t have time.”

“We can do it after,” Scott argued.

“ _Do it_ after?” Tessa quipped archly, her lips pressed together, and oh yeah this was definitely a good sign; if she was joking then she was definitely getting back in the game, and the air between them felt noticeably lightened.

Scott laughed and kissed her again, this time on the mouth.  “That too, sure,” he agreed wholeheartedly. “I’ll make breakfast and coffee and we’ll talk—or do other things—for as long as you want.  But right now, I just want to hold you for a while, Tess. Is that okay?”

Tessa’s eyes softened and she melted right into him, like she’d been wanting to this whole time and had only been waiting for him to ask.  “It’s more than okay,” she told him. She ducked against Scott’s chest to hide her blush, and Scott reveled in the way her lips curled into a smile against his skin.

“Good,” Scott replied.

They slid back down to the bed and tucked themselves under the covers not long after that, both well and truly exhausted.  They fell asleep with their bodies curled in toward one another and their hands clasped together between them.

\--

Scott woke up what seemed like an instant later to the feeling of his cheek sticking to the car upholstery, a seat belt cutting into his side and Tessa’s hand roughly jostling his shoulder.

“Come on, Scott,” Tessa prodded.  “We’re home.”

His eyes snapped open and he took in the sight of Tessa’s face, backlit dimly by the overhead light in the truck and the eerie stillness of the woods stretched out behind her.  A few feet away he could hear Meryl and Charlie bickering amiably as they struggled with the sticky lock on the front door. His stomach lurched painfully, and for a moment he thought he might vomit.

Apparently he must have looked like he would, too, because Tessa’s eyebrows shot up and she leaned in toward him with concern.  “What?” he questioned.

Scott stared at her, his eyes tracing the tense line of her jaw, and the reality of the situation hit him in a sudden rush.  “ _Shit_ ,” he said, and it wasn’t a response so much as it was a knee-jerk reaction.  

He was back.  This was _not_ good.


	6. A Brand New Day

When Scott rolled over in bed that morning and saw Tessa lying next to him, her face lax with sleep, he immediately broke into a panicky sweat.  He was wearing clothes this time, which was a plus, but this was the second night in a row he’d woken up in a bed other than the one he’d fallen asleep in and he had no idea how or when he’d migrated over here during the night.  And the novelty of that experience was quickly wearing off.

 _Maybe T’s right and I_ am _going crazy,_ he thought to himself.  The evidence _was_ kind of starting to pile up.  The last thirteen years of his life were one big blank spot, and now he was apparently forgetting more recent details, too.  God, what if he’d actually had a stroke? Or developed a tumor? All of Tessa’s somewhat doomsday-esque predictions from yesterday started to creep back up on him, one by one.  The thought that he might be losing it was absolutely terrifying, and Scott sat up quickly, beginning to truly spiral, when his train of thought was derailed by a strange prickling sensation along his lower back.  

Scott turned his head and craned his neck, rucking up his sleep shirt to get a good view, and stared in shock at the faint red lines he saw there.   _Nail marks_ , his brain supplied helpfully.  He shot a glance over toward Tessa and his eyes gravitated to where her hands were curled up innocently under her chin.  There were a number of ways he could have acquired these injuries, and he resolutely decided to consider exactly _zero_ of them.  

Now that he was actively taking stock of what was happening with his body, though, he realized that the scratches weren’t the only injury he’d sustained during the night; his hip was throbbing, and while he could’ve chalked it up just being fucking _old_ and having slept on it badly, he was beginning to get suspicious of the radiating, sharp pain.  Scott lifted his t-shirt to check it out and, yep, there was a massive, purpling bruise there that hadn’t been the day before.  It hurt like a bitch, and he had absolutely no idea where it had come from.

He was getting sick and tired of this shit.

Tessa’s alarm went off a minute later, jarring Scott out of his thoughts.  He watched, heart suddenly pounding, as she rolled over to snooze it with a very familiar groan.  Despite the circumstances, Scott couldn’t help but smirk; it would seem as though some things never changed.  But then Tessa was flopping an arm over in Scott’s direction, grabbing a fistful of his shirt and using it to haul him in toward her, and the smirk fell right of of his face.

“Ugh,” she groused, “maybe I _should_ skip that morning meeting after all.”  She turned onto her side, propping herself on an elbow and fixing him with a _very_ pointed look, and Scott shuddered involuntarily.  Zinging sparks seemed to shoot up from the scratches along his back, and Scott scrambled quickly away from her before he summoned up a mental image that he _really_ couldn’t force away.

“T,” he said warningly, his voice climbing a good octave.

Tessa’s face took a moment to make the change from shock to understanding.  Then, groaning, she flopped back face-down against the bed. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she grumbled, her voice coming out muffled by her pillow.  She raised her head just high enough to glare at Scott out of the corner of one eye. “You’re not _my_ Scott, are you?”

Scott swallowed and shook his head rapidly.  “No,” he admitted.

Tessa turned her face back into the mattress with a sigh, and there was a moment of pure, terrifying silence before her shoulders started to shake.  Scott looked on in shock, worried that she had started to cry and unsure of what to do about it. Should he...pat her on the shoulder, maybe? Go in for the hug?  Or could he pretend it wasn’t happening until she stopped? But then the sound of Tessa’s laugh bubbled out loud and clear, and Scott sagged back against the bed with relief.  

“God, I’m sorry,” Tessa told him, her voice a bit hoarse with half-repressed giggles.  “You must think I’m horrible. I’m not trying to jump you. Honestly. I thought you were…”

“Your Scott,” Scott supplied, suddenly understanding.   “Was...I...he...here last night?”

Tessa nodded.  “He was,” she said, wistful.  She was looking Scott in the eye as she spoke, but it almost felt like she was looking through him instead.  

“What happened?” Scott questioned.

“Last night, near midnight, I woke up because you were banging around the apartment, and when you came running into the room you were...well, you were _you_ again.  We talked, and you told me that you’d spent the past day with the younger version of me on your spring vacation in Michigan.  We think that you and he may have traded places in time.”

Honestly, Scott couldn’t help but feel a little miffed by this turn of events.  He’d wasted the better part of an hour yesterday trying to convince Tess that he was from the past and she _still_ hadn’t believed him for a second.  And, worse, still, she’d even started to convicince _him_ that he was wrong.  Now, apparently a few minutes’ worth of mediocre explanation by Future Scott was all it took to get her fully on the time-travel-and-body-switching train.  

It was unfair, really.  

Once he’d worked through _that_ whole business, however, another thought came to him.  “Is Tess okay?” Scott asked. “My Tess, I mean?”

Tessa was still gazing back and through Scott’s head, but her face softened a little at his concern for her past self.  “Yes,” she replied. “My Scott is looking after her. She told him that she would to help him find out what is going on with us, apparently.”

Scott breathed a sigh of relief.  “Good,” he said. And then, that concern addressed, he felt able to get on to another thing that had been bothering him.  “So...what happened to my hip?”

“Unclear,” Tessa replied, chuckling.  “Although I suspect that you had a run-in with the end table in the hall.  I didn’t see it, but I definitely heard it.”

“Huh,” Scott said, frowning and rubbing the smarting spot.  “Well, that’s inconvenient.”

“It is,” Tessa agreed, but it didn’t sound like she was talking about a hip bruise.  Her eyes went back to looking back and through Scott’s head, and the vacancy of her stare was starting to wig him out.

“Are you...are you okay?” he checked, cautious.  “I mean...”

“Oh absolutely not,” Tessa replied.  Any remaining trace of amusement drained right off her face, and it was jarring how clearly serious she was when she’d been cackling away just a minute before.  “I’m furious. I don’t know what’s happening to us, I don’t know why, and I don’t know where or how to start figuring it out. And I’m especially furious _right now_ because I have to be out the door for a meeting in exactly one hour and ten minutes, which is nowhere near enough time to develop any kind of solution.”

Scott gulped, his eyes going wide as saucers.  He knew rationally that Tessa’s anger wasn’t directed at him, but that didn’t make it any less scary to hear her use that tone of voice in his general proximity.  “So what are we going to do?” he asked finally.

“First,” Tessa said, “I’m going to shower and prepare for the day.  And then we are going to get down to business.”

 

Thirty minutes later, Scott found himself watching in amazement as Tessa shotgunned two cups of cold, day-old coffee and then immediately launched into an intricate survival plan that she’d come up with in the shower.  It was only their “stopgap plan” according to Tessa, to be used until they could figure out a better long-term solution, but it still managed to be much more detailed than a lot of long-term plans Scott had made.

It was multi-tiered, composed of a central conceit bounded by the terms of several ground rules.

The conceit went like this: “You are feeling ill, Scott.  You are puking your guts out and sleeping twenty-hour days with little to no energy.  You can’t go anywhere, you don’t want to see anybody, and you’re not well at all. You want nothing more than to stay in the house and recuperate so that you can get back to work as soon as you can.”  

This was apparently made possible with little to no suspicion because Scott was on vacation this week from whatever mysterious thing he normally did for work, although Tessa wouldn’t say what that was or why he was taking a break.  This sudden desire for secrecy, as it turned out, led perfectly into Tessa’s next topic of discussion, which was the plan’s ground rules. There were several, both major and minor, but the highlights were as follows:

  1. Do not try to find out anything about your future self, Scott, because it will almost certainly wreck your life when you get back to the past.  I am going to try to tell you as little about the future as possible, and you need to help me by agreeing to _not_ pry.  Do _not_ try to find press clips of us—stay away from the news in general actually—and for god’s sake, whatever you do, do _not_ google yourself, okay?  Oh god, you didn’t _already_ google yourself, did you?  (He hadn’t. And when Tessa followed that question up with another one about what he’d done all day he had to somewhat sheepishly admit that after accessing the internet he had stumbled upon a site called Youtube and become sucked into a vortex of increasingly obscure cooking tutorials for over three hours before zonking out on the couch.)  
  2. Do not speak to anyone except me, period.  If the phone rings, let it go. If someone knocks on the door, pretend not to be home.  Don’t try to contact anyone, and don’t try to get anyone to contact you. You’re a shitty actor, Scott Moir, and no one else can know what’s happening with you or they’ll think you’re going crazy.
  3. Do not leave this apartment unless the building is literally in the process of burning to the ground.  I am serious. I can’t tell you precisely why it’s important, so you’ll just have to trust me.  You do trust me, don’t you? (He did.) But I can say that if anyone sees you it could be very bad.



And then, on that definitely-not-ominous note, Tessa locked Scott into the apartment with a list of edible items in the kitchen and a promise to be back by three.

 

\--

 

Meanwhile, back in Skanee, Scott’s older self was trying to quickly but carefully fold up the timelines he and Tess had made last night on a long, taped-together line of notebook paper pages before Charlie had the chance to burst in.  Tessa was still asleep on the bed beside him, snoring lightly, and Scott couldn’t help the way his eyes ping-ponged between her and the papers as he worked.

Last night had been a tipping point for them, and he didn’t know how it would affect them in the light of day.  

When he’d woken up back in the past, the first thing he’d done after managing to peel himself off the interior of the truck was drag Tessa into the guest bedroom  and unpack everything that had just happened. It had only taken about five minutes, all told, but Scott had felt himself growing more anxious the longer he spoke.  Both of them had sat silently in the aftermath, just staring blankly at one another from opposite sides of the room for a long minute as they metabolized what it all meant.

And then Tessa had started to cry.  Scott had understood the impulse immediately because he had kind of wanted to burst into disappointed tears himself, so he had gathered Tess into his chest and pressed his cheek to her hair as he had swallowed back his own tears and let her cry herself out.  

“I’m sorry,” Tessa had said, after she’d managed to re-regulate her breathing.  “I’m not...I’m not _ungrateful_ that you’re here, Scott.  But _my_ Scott was back with me and I didn’t even get to say hello to him.  I’m just…”

“I know, Tess,” Scott had replied.  He had still been clutching her to him like a lifeline, as though she might disappear if he slackened his grip for even a second.  “I really, really do. I love being here with you, but I miss my Tessa. And I feel guilty for missing her because you’re _right here_ , but I still do.”

Tessa had nodded against his chest and wormed an arm up between them to swipe at her eyes with the back of her hand.  “Yeah,” she had said, quietly. “My Scott’s an idiot, but I miss him, too.”

And there had been no way Scott could have avoided laughing at that, and the unexpectedly joyful sound had done wonders for breaking up the tense mood between them.  They’d stayed on the topic for a while after that, swapping stories and fond memories until they both settled down. It had felt nice to have come to an understanding about the matter, and it had felt especially nice to realize that they were, as usual, thinking along the same lines when it came to this situation.  

After that, Tessa had gone to her backpack, pulled out some supplies, and they’d spent the next hour comparing the course of their lives up to the point of this spring break.  It had been a gruelling, tedious process, and the whole ordeal had led them to the rather anticlimatic conclusion that—excusing the good/bad training week divide and the decision to come here—there were literally no differences between their situations.  

Then they’d gone to sleep, Scott on the couch in the other room and Tess on the guest bed in here, and Scott had woken up, brushed his teeth, and come here to hide their horrifying conspiracy-timeline mess they’d created last night.

Some five minutes of work later, Scott had finally managed to compress the whole timeline back down to a manageable size to be stuffed back into Tess’s backpack when his partner started to wake up.  

Grumpy as always in the morning, she groaned as rolled from her side to her back to stretch, her arms going wide and her toes pointing as she shook the sleepiness out of her limbs.  Scott watched in silence, comforted by the familiarity, as he placed their notes into Tess’s French folder and re-zipped her backpack.

“Scott?” Tessa questioned, the word halfway swallowed by a yawn.  “Is that you?”

“Mm-hm,” Scott hummed.  He could feel Tessa’s eyes on his back, tracing over his shoulders.  “Just putting our things away from last night. You can go back to sleep, T.”

“No, I’m up,” Tessa insisted.  The words were a bit gravelly, but Scott didn’t doubt her sincerity.  

“Want to help me make breakfast, then?” he asked her.  “I think we have everything we need for french toast.”

“Pass,” Tessa replied, rolling back onto her side.  “You can’t cook, and neither can I.”

“Au contraire,” Scott replied with a laugh.  “Being old has _some_ advantages.  I can now make exactly five food items.”

“Which are?” Tessa prompted.  

“French toast, regular toast, scrambled eggs, pasta, and soup from a can,” Scott reported, turning around to grin at her.  He may have been stretching the truth a little bit for dramatic effect—he was certain that he could make at least _seven_ culinary masterpieces, thank you very much—but it was worth it for the genuinely joyful expression that took over Tessa’s face the moment the words were out of his mouth.

“Wow, you’re practically a chef,” she laughed, her own silliness seemingly triggered by Scott’s good mood.  “Wouldn’t it be a little suspicious to Meryl and Charlie, though, if you suddenly gained cooking skills?”

“Maybe you’re right,” Scott mused.  “But it would almost be worth it, considering that our alternatives are Charlie’s blueberry yoghurt or Meryl’s horrible cereal.”

“That cereal tastes like tree bark,” Tessa agreed with a sigh.  “We should’ve done our own shopping, honestly.”

“Hm,” Scott said, squinting his eyes in thought.  He _really_ didn’t want to have shitty breakfast two days in a row just for the sake of theatrical accuracy.  “How about a compromise? We can make two good pieces for ourselves before Meryl and Charlie get up, then burn the rest.”

Tessa’s smile grew wide.  “Yes!” she said, suddenly gleeful.  “Let’s do it.”

Scott grinned at her, feeling like his heart was actually starting to expand in his chest.  Then he went to the kitchen and cooked his partner the first decent meal he’d ever made her.  They allowed themselves a few minutes to dig in happily, quiet save for the noises of chewing and silverware clattering busily across their plates, before Scott relinquished the stove to Tessa’s (in)capable hands.

Charlie and Meryl appeared ten minutes later, coughing and complaining loudly, as Scott transferred the first batch of charcoal briquettes to the trash can.


	7. A Day Of Transitions

All day yesterday, when there had been almost no limit on what he could do, Scott had given surprisingly little thought to his life here in the future.  Maybe he’d still been in shock, trying to avoid thinking about it, or maybe he’d really just been _that_ unphased.  

Either way, he was in a totally different frame of mind today.  Now that he’d been explicitly told not to dig, he felt like it was all he could think about.  It was definitely the contrarian in him more than it was due to any genuine curiosity, but the first thing he wanted to do after Tessa locked up was go straight to the internet and read every article about himself that had ever been published.  

But, because he did have _some_ self control (thank you very much), he just paced the apartment in his pyjamas and let the thoughts drive him crazy.  It didn’t help that the whole house was littered with little breadcrumbs, clues that he could hardly help but string together.  There were Olympic rings in the background of a photo on the living room window sill. There was a shopping list in his handwriting pinned to the fridge with a Leafs magnet that included the items _tin foil, gorilla glue, prosciutto, massage oil, french bread,_ and _pomade_ , which seemed like a questionable and thought-provoking mix.  There was a sports psychology book on the kitchen table about the power of positive affirmations and a thick stack of glossy fashion magazines full of post-its and Tessa's chicken scratch on the (allegedly) adversarial end table in the hall.

Before he realized what he was doing, Scott had begun to pick the whole apartment apart piece by piece.  He knew it violated the _spirit_ of the rules Tessa had laid down that morning, but it wasn’t an explicitly forbidden behavior.  And, with little else to do since he was trapped in an unfamiliar and severely under-decorated flat with an explicit ban on watching daytime TV and browsing the internet, Scott found that he couldn’t help himself.

 _It’s not prying,_ he reassured himself, trying to assuage the guilt he felt when he remembered the borderline-panicked look that had been all over Tessa’s face that morning.   _It’s just...being observant.  Noticing things._

Despite the minimalist decor of the apartment, Scott managed to find quite a lot to _notice._ Only casual, easily-observable things, of course.  He _noticed_ the contents of the sparsely-stocked fridge (mainly condiments, leftovers, and half-full cartons of eggs).  He _noticed_ every single preset channel on the TV favorites menu (HGTV, NHL Network, CBC, and Animal Planet).  He _noticed_ all the jackets in the coat closet, and then he _noticed_ the contents of all of their pockets.

And when a wallet that was probably his showed up in the pocket of a blazer, he _noticed_ that, too.  There was a hundred and fifty dollars in the back and a glossy little photo of him and Tessa as kids, both gap-toothed and grinning into the camera, tucked behind his driver’s license.  He stopped to think _God, man, future-me is such a fucking sap_ before he slipped the photo very carefully back into its little hiding place and then jammed the wallet into his pants pocket.

After he’d successfully stared down every pair of shoes in the closet and given the rest of the entry/living room/kitchen space a sufficiently suspicious once-over, he realized that he’d run out of casually observable things in the area.

He was tempted to check out the bedrooms afterward, but it was a lot harder to feel casual about that.  It was _their_ apartment, he told himself; it wasn’t really snooping if it was half his anyway.  But he knew that probably wasn’t right, either, because he might be Scott but he very obviously wasn’t the _right_ Scott, so the anxiety only built as he crept down the hall, half expecting Tess to pop out from behind a corner and start yelling.  

But Tessa didn’t materialize, so he just kept walking toward the master bedroom with a queasy feeling roiling about in his stomach.  

Entering that room felt like cracking open someone else’s diary.  It was as intimate as the rest of the apartment was impersonal, the space clearly his and Tessa’s just on first glance.  The big four-poster bed with its plain navy comforter would’ve looked like something Scott had picked for himself if not for the decorative throw pillows at the head of the bed.  The bookcase behind the door overflowed with a mix of titles that he could easily split into _Scott_ and _Tessa_ categories, but on the shelves they appeared to be jumbled up together almost indiscriminately.  Eclectic decorations cluttered the pale-blue walls, a framed picture of peonies coexisting happily between a country music record and a small hanging plant.  

Scott gravitated toward the night stand on what he assumed was his side of the bed, noticing how similar it looked to his current bedside table at home.  An old coffee mug rested atop a stack of books and magazines, and a notebook and several pens warred for the remaining space with a stack of post-its and papers covered front and back with his own writing.  

He picked one of the post-its, curious, and read it.   _Dinner with Charlie, 8 on Fri._ Most of the papers appeared to contain similar sentiments, little reminders to himself or notes on his schedule.  Some of them were about skating, things like _better edges at 2:10_ and _weak transitions_ and _half a beat behind on the first part of the step sequence_ , but they were all too vague for Scott to decide if they were meant for him and Tess or for someone else.

Tessa’s side was neater: a few pieces of jewelry in a decorative bowl, a journal, a single book, a pair of reading glasses, and a candle shared the space on her bedside table, their positions meticulously aligned.  Scott picked up the candle on an impulse, and the faint vanilla scent of it triggered some hindbrain-deep memory from when they were young, a static moment of them leaning together on the long drive to Kitchener-Waterloo as the sun rose ahead of them, Tessa’s breathing loud in his ear.  The feeling associated with the memory was so exact and particular and _immediate_ , like it had happened only yesterday.  He put the candle down with a shudder, spooked.

He was about to move on, feeling like he was starting to overstep his bounds, when something caught his eye: a little black box, caught between the back edge of the table and the wall like it had been knocked back there by mistake.  He crouched down low, rooting around for it blindly, and after a brief struggle he he found himself crouched on the floor with a small velvet jewelry box in his hand.

He paused for a moment then, just staring at it dumbly as his heart flip-flopped around in his chest.  He didn’t know exactly why he was nervous, but something about the little cube was setting him off.

He tore it open.

A ring bounced right out of the box and into his palm, like it had been hastily replaced instead of slotted properly into its little cushion.  Scott rolled it around in his hand, studying the way it caught the light. It was a simple band, silver with a single line of inlaid diamonds going all the way around, but its purpose was unmistakable all the same.  

“Oh shit,” he whispered.

This was Tessa’s engagement ring.  And if it was _Tessa’s_ engagement ring that had fallen from _her_ nightstand in _their_ shared apartment, then that meant...

Scott felt like his legs were about to collapse out from under him, so he eased himself down to sitting on the floor and leaned back against the bed for support.  He was _engaged to Tessa Virtue._

“Fuck,” he said emphatically.  The word seemed to fill the small space of their bedroom, echoing back to him off the walls.  He felt like he wanted to either vomit or run a marathon, like this was simultaneously the worst and the best moment of his life.

Only now did he realize that that this was exactly the sort of thing that Tessa had been trying to avoid with her _no prying_ mandate.  It had been a good idea on her part, definitely good planning, because he didn’t know how this knowledge was going to affect the past but he _certainly_ knew that it was having a huge fucking impact on his present.

Eventually, Scott restored the ring to its box and jammed it back behind the end table, which made him feel strangely better.  He felt even better once he’d removed himself from the room, and even better still once he’d made his way back to the kitchen and shoved a good two servings’ worth of Chinese food into his face while spooning the take-out box on the tile floor.

He spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about trying _not_ to think about being engaged to Tess, which of course was wildly ineffective.  He wondered how he’d proposed and how long ago it had been and how she’d reacted.  He wondered if their families knew. He wondered if they were supposed to be planning the wedding right now, and if he’d seen her in her dress.  

(He also wondered why he didn’t feel more surprised, but he pushed that thought down as quickly as it arose.  There were some things about his relationship with Tessa that he didn’t feel ready to consider.)

In the end, he gave up on not thinking about it and switched tracks to thinking about how he was going to play this with Tessa when she got home.  

The path of least resistance would probably be to just tell her the truth: that he’d found the ring while he was walking around the apartment, and that he’d figured out what it meant.  It was a good solution because it kept him from having to lie to the person he was worst at lying to, which was definitely his preferred modus operandi. But it would also definitely freak Tessa out and make her worried and panicky, which he wanted to avoid.  

Also, he couldn’t think of a way to frame what had happened that didn’t include saying “hey, I chose to blatantly ignore the rules you gave me and also I decided to go through your personal shit.”  If he couldn’t avoid saying that, then he was _definitely_ going to get himself in trouble.  And the last thing he wanted to do was fall out of the good graces of this older, scarier, exceptionally more formidable version of Tess.

Scott chewed on it and chewed on it until it made his head ache without coming to a solution, and then he went to the bathroom, took some painkillers, and went back to the living room to try and dull his mind with TV.  He’d figure it out later, he decided to himself as he halfheartedly tried to focus on an episode of _The Most Extreme_ on Animal Planet.  But he knew he wouldn’t, at least not before Tess got back at three.  He’d definitely put it off and put it off until it was too late, and then whatever came out of his mouth when she walked in the door would be the end of it.  

But then three o’clock rolled around and Tessa didn’t come back.  Three became three thirty, and three-thirty became four, and Scott could feel himself getting more and more nervous with each minute that passed as she didn’t walk through the door.  

Maybe something had happened to her, he thought anxiously.  Maybe she was in some kind of trouble and he wasn’t there to help.  Or maybe she’d realized that dealing with Scott as a teenager was going to be a freaking nightmare so she’d just taken off and left him here all alone.  

No, Tessa wouldn’t do that to him, he rationalized.  She’d said that she loved him just this morning. She’d promised to help him, to come up with a plan and to figure this all out.  She’d probably just forgotten about another commitment or run late at work. It would be fine.

But Scott couldn’t help the way his leg bounced restlessly as he watched TV, or the way his heart picked up every time there was a noise outside the door.

 

Tessa finally stumbled back into the apartment a little after five PM looking like she’d just been hit by a bus.  There was a briefcase slung crookedly over her shoulder, a brown paper IGA bag propped against her hip, and an absolutely murderous expression on her face.

Scott shot up from his seat, nervous and relieved and surprised all at once, and he turned her way just in time to watch her step out of her heels, stoop down to grab them, and straighten back up and lob them across the room.  They landed against the floor with a loud crack, and Scott watched silently as Tessa stared straight at them with a sharp, unreadable look.

“Hey,” Scott said, cutting into the silence.

Tessa’s head snapped toward him and she noticeably sagged, the tension bleeding from her face and leaving fatigue behind.  “Hey, Scott,” she replied. Her voice was quiet and surprisingly hoarse, and the sound of it tugged painfully at Scott’s heartstrings.

“Here,” he said, stepping forward and reaching for the groceries, “Let me take care of those for you.”

Tessa relinquished the bag easily, and Scott left her in the entryway and set himself to busily unloading everything.  When he came back a few minutes later Tessa’s jacket, scarf, and briefcase were in a pile by the front door and she was laying flat across the couch with her blazer unbuttoned and her eyes squeezed tightly shut.

“You okay, Tess?” he asked, already knowing the answer.  

“Fine, yeah,” Tessa said, in that tone of hers that always meant the opposite.  “Work was just...long today. I’m tired.”

Scott watched her for a moment, studying the way she was gritting her teeth and the tension written all over her and trying to parse what it meant.  He sat down on the end of the couch by her feet, just barely perching, and tried not to feel insulted when her she curled her legs up away from him, her face screwing up into a grimace.  

“Can you get me some ibuprofen, please?” Tessa gritted out after a while, keeping her eyes closed.  “It’s in the bathroom under the sink.”

“Sure,” Scott replied.  “Of course.” He retrieved the bottle along with a glass of water and returned to the living room, and Tessa propped herself up against the back of the couch and took them from him gratefully.  

“Thanks,” she said.  Then she shook three pills out of the bottle and chased them with the whole glass of water.  

“Are you sure you’re okay, T?” Scott tried again, unable to ignore the stress-tight pinch of her mouth.

“I’m fine,” Tessa repeated, but she took one look at Scott’s worry-ridden face and sighed before beginning a course-correction.  “I’m just...in a little bit of pain right now. My legs are hurting from being in heels all day; it’s something that happens sometimes.”

Scott immediately looked down at her legs, like he was expecting to see blood seeping out from beneath her pantyhoes, and noticed the way she was flexing and unflexing her toes almost unconsciously, like she just couldn’t help it.  Her hands were clasped together tightly in her laps, nails biting into the skin of the backs of her hands, and her knuckles were white from the tightness of her grip.

“Just a little bit?” he checked, suspicious.  

“Not just a little bit,” Tessa conceded.  Her voice was still hoarse, and it made the admission sound worse.  

“Where?” Scott asked, vaguely cognizant of the way his voice was starting to get sharp.  

“My shins,” Tessa admitted.  “And my calves. It isn’t anything new.  I don’t want to talk about why, but let’s just say this isn’t the first time this has happened.  I just need a minute to relax and I’ll be okay.”

“I…” Scott started, but his voice died out when he realized that he didn’t quite know how to finish.  

“Scott,” Tessa said, obviously about to start reassuring him, but Scott rushed in before she could, feeling his thoughts catch back up to the present.

“I know I’m not the right version of me,” he interrupted, feeling his cheeks go a little red.  “But is there something that I would normally do to help, when this happens?”  

Tessa’s eyes flitted across Scott’s face, and the intensity of her focus on him made him feel skittish.  “Yes, there is,” she replied.

“What would I normally do?”

“Normally, you would massage them,” Tessa confessed, her expression softening with wistfulness.  “You would get me a beer from the fridge and rub my legs while I drank it and tell me about your day.”

“I can do that,” Scott said.  

“You don’t have to,” Tessa told him, sighing.  “You aren’t him, Scott. It’s okay.”

“No, I want to,” Scott insisted.  He felt his determination spike almost spitefully in response to her words, feeling resentfully competitive at the way Tessa seemed to so clearly see his future self as _better_.  And then, before Tessa could get another word in, he popped back up from the couch and went to the fridge to retrieve a beer from the inside door.

He cracked it open on the way back to the living room and handed it to Tess without a word, his jaw set tight, and he didn’t miss the way a smile twitched at the corners of her mouth as she accepted it.  

“Thank you,” Tessa said, taking a sip.  

“You’re welcome,” Scott replied.  And then, without any preamble, he seated himself beside Tessa and towed her legs into his lap.  He rested his hands on top of her shins, the touch feather-light, and he slid his thumb quietly up and down a long, unfamiliar scar across the bone.  

The room felt so still all of a sudden, and he could hear Tessa’s breathing and the traffic from the street down below and the soft scratching sound of his finger dragging over the thin fabric.  Tessa’s eyes were wide and dark as she watched him, her mouth caught just slightly open in a way that looked either trusting or shocked.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said, nervousness suddenly flooding back.  “So just...tell me if something feels wrong.”

“Okay,” Tessa replied.  Her jaw was still clenched tight in obvious pain, but she looked surprisingly calm.

Scott nodded, willing some of Tessa’s reassurance to transfer over to him as he curled his hands around Tessa’s right leg and pressed down with his thumbs, starting down at her ankle and working slowly up.  He didn’t know what sort of pressure he should be going for but he was terrified of making things worse instead of better, so he started very lightly.

“Can you press a little harder?” Tessa asked, her voice startling Scott enough to make him flinch. 

Scott felt his face heat up with embarrassment.  “Yeah,” he replied. “Sure, Tess.”

He dug in more insistently after that, his right thumb tracing the line where bone met muscle and then smoothing across the area in circles.  His other hand gripped the back of her calf just below the knee, holding her leg steady, and he could feel it as she relaxed under his palm.  

“Perfect, thank you,” Tessa said.  

For a while after that, Scott and Tessa fell into a sort of impasse, quiet except for Tessa’s little comments here and there— _a little harder_ and _a little to the right_ and _thank you, Scott_ , always in the quietest, most relaxed voice—and the way Scott could actually feel the tension in his own body release as Tessa became calmer and more comfortable.  By the time he’d finished with her right leg and moved on to her left, there was barely a thought left in his head.

“Tell me what you did today,” Tessa said, her voice low and lazy as Scott swiped the thumb of his free hand against the pad of her foot.  

Scott looked up at her, curious, and grinned when he saw the way she had slumped back into the couch with her eyes closed, like she was relaxed enough to go to sleep.  Her beer was cradled against her throat, condensation beading against the place where the can touched her skin.

“Nothing much,” he replied, unsettled by how honest he felt saying it.  “Not a lot to do around here, you know.”

“Mmh,” Tessa hummed.  “I did feel bad about that, you know.  Leaving you alone without anything to do.  You must have been bored out of your mind.”

“I watched a lot of Animal Planet,” Scott admitted.  “And I ate a lot of the leftovers in the fridge.”

“A lot of them, eh?” Tessa asked, chuckling.  Scott dug his thumb into her calf and Tessa tensed and then relaxed with a sigh.  “Starting with the Chinese food, I bet.”

“Yep,” Scott replied.  “What was that, the noodle dish?”

“Chicken lo mein,” Tessa supplied.  

“That one,” Scott agreed.  “That was delicious.”

“Oh I know,” Tessa laughed.  “It’s your favorite. But it’s very unhealthy, so we don’t get it very often or we’d have to start watching our figures.”

Scott smiled at Tessa’s matter-of-fact tone, but he kept his eyes trained on her legs and kept working.  “So,” he said, trying to keep his tone light, “Wanna tell me about your day?”

There was a pause, then, and Scott had just enough time to worry that he’d said something wrong before Tessa answered.  “Yes,” she grumbled, sagging further into the couch. “I really do. But I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“I get it,” Scott replied, but he felt himself frown a little anyway.  

“But maybe we could do something else,” Tessa suggested.  “I thought of a game for us today.” She sounded hopeful in a way that brought a reflexive smile to Scott’s face.

“And what’s that?” he asked.  

“We can trade favorites,” Tessa said, obviously pleased with herself.  

“Trade favorites?” Scott questioned.

“You can ask me a question—favorite book, favorite scent, that sort of thing—and I’ll answer.  Then you can tell me what you think it was back when I was younger, to compare. And then we’ll switch and I’ll ask you.  I thought that it would be a good way for us to learn a little about one another without breaking any of the rules.”

Scott couldn’t help but grin, pleased both because Tessa wanted to get to know him and because she’d obviously been struggling with her own stopgap plan almost as much as Scott had been.  “Sure,” he replied. “That sounds good to me.”

“Perfect,” Tessa said.  “I’ll start. Favorite sports team?”

“The Leafs,” Scott replied.  “Obviously. Same or different?”

“Same,” Tessa reassured him, chuckling.  “Your turn.”

“Hm,” Scott considered, smirking as he thought of a good one.  “Favorite skater?”

“Patrick Chan,” Tessa replied evenly.  

Scott found himself spluttering immediately, offended and unsure of whether she was joking or not.  

“Relax, Scott, I was kidding,” Tessa reassured him, laughing.  “You. Of course.”

“Good,” Scott replied, unable to hide his wide smile.

“Same or different?” Tessa questioned, unnecessarily.  

“Same,” Scott confirmed.  “Although maybe not. You _do_ like Fedor a whole lot; you're always going on about him.”  

Tessa grimaced at him, rolling her eyes.  He’d just been joking, but Tessa's reaction let him know that there was obviously something more, there.  Scott's curiosity was immediately piqued, and wanted to ask about it but he knew better.  “That’s ridiculous,” Tessa said, quiet but firm. “You’ve always been my favorite skater.”

There was something so kind and unguarded in her voice that Scott couldn’t help but stop and stare, scrambling to process it.  It wasn’t like Tessa wasn’t embarrassingly sweet to him back in his own time, but there was something different about this. When _his_ Tessa complimented him like that her voice always lifted up at the end like it was a question and she was waiting for him to give her the answer.  

There was none of that hesitance in her now.  She was confident and unashamed, and she stared Scott straight in the eyes as he processed her words, smiling at his dumb-struck reaction.  

“Thanks, T,” he said finally, embarrassed but unsure of why.  

“Of course,” Tessa replied, casual as you please.  Then she flexed her toes in his lap, poking at his hip, and Scott realized that he’d stopped rubbing her shins to stare at her.  He started again with a blush, quiet, and let the conversation die out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a longer chapter to involve just one of our two pairs, but I felt like it was time to check in with young Scott and hang out with him for a little bit more of his day-to-day struggle. Young Tess and older Scott will return next chapter!


	8. Détente

Late afternoon at the cabin found Scott sweating through his t-shirt as he sat on the porch swing next to Charlie White, Charlie’s legs jolting the two of them rapidly back and forth.  A few feet off, Tessa and Meryl were laid out in swimsuits on beach towels on the driveway, trying to soak up some vitamin D while the weather held out.

Tess’s hair was piled into a bun on the top of her head, and she had on a pair of cheap red sunglasses and a pink two-piece that Scott thought she might still have somewhere in the bowels of her underwear drawer back in Montreal.  She’d had her thumb jammed into the same page of her book for the past half hour, holding her place, as Meryl talked her ear off about something Scott wasn’t quite close enough to overhear. Tessa had gone almost completely silent a good ten minutes ago, and Scott could read the distress signal in her tense jaw and her down-tipped chin loud and clear.  

He’d been tempted to cut in once or twice, but every time he’d been considering it Charlie had managed to distract him with something new—a look at the antique rifle his uncle kept in the safe in the garage, a cold beer from the fridge, another attempt to goad Scott into diving into the lake off the high metal fishing dock despite the massive white-capped waves and the half-melted snow piles along the rocky shore.  

Maybe Charlie’s age was making it hard to get a read on him or maybe the years had just turned Scott suspicious, but he couldn’t tell if Charlie was actively trying to pull something over on him.  Scott realized, rationally, that it was a ridiculous idea because Charlie seemed excited just to have someone around who would talk about hockey instead of lecturing him about eating healthy and using sunscreen (someone, that was, who wasn’t Meryl).  But Scott still wasn’t a hundred percent _sure_ , and it ate at him uncomfortably.

It was possible, though, that the whole situation would have eaten at him anyway, just from the strangeness of how much had changed.  His last interaction with Charlie White had been a five-minute snippet of small talk at a charity gala several months ago, and Charlie had spent the length of their brief conversation discussing his grand scheme for remodeling his master bathroom.  Back in this time, he and Charlie were still close friends and Charlie’s idea of a “grand scheme” was rigging up a rowboat with a speedboat motor to drive across the bay to Isle Royale.

Over the top of Charlie’s head, Scott watched Meryl lean back to laugh at something Tessa had said, and he couldn’t help but notice the way Tess flinched away from the sound, her shoulders drawing instinctively inward even as her mouth snapped into a quick smile.  It was a classic Tessa Virtue tell, one that meant she was quickly approaching her daily quota for social interaction. In the future, this would be the moment when she’d politely excuse herself from the conversation and go lie down for an hour in complete silence to let her brain reset.  But this _wasn’t_ the future, which meant that Tessa had not yet acquired that skill.  Which, by extension, meant that she was either going to clam up or start getting testy very, very soon.

_Time to go,_ Scott thought to himself as he halfheartedly soldiered on in his conversation with Charlie.  The topic had stayed on the logistics of the potential(ly dangerous) plan to boat out to Isle Royale, which was fortunate because Charlie was more than enthusiastic enough for the two of them.  Scott bided his time, nodding and contributing as necessary, and when an opening appeared less than a minute later he was quick to latch onto it.

“We should see what the girls think about this,” Scott suggested, trying to be subtle.

“Sure,” Charlie agreed.

Scott popped up from his seat right away.  “Hey T,” he called over to her, “Charlie and I were thinking we should boat out to Isle Royale tomorrow.  You wanna come?”

“Maybe,” Tessa replied hesitantly, looking a little skeptical.  

Beside her, Meryl was more than just a _little_ skeptical, and she shook her head in clear exasperation.  “How would we even get out there, Scott?” she questioned.

“We’ve got the row boat,” Charlie volunteered.  “And we’ve got that old motor in the shed that’s still good.  We could probably rig something together, don’t you think?”

“I think so,” Scott lied.  “But we’d have to get gas for the motor.”

“There’s probably some in the shed,” Charlie responded, pointedly avoiding the way his partner’s expression was changing from exasperated to resigned.

“Maybe,” Scott allowed, “But it’s gonna be like twenty years old, man.  I don’t want to wreck the engine with it. I was thinking I’d take the can from the garage and go fill it up in town.”

“Sure,” Charlie replied.  “I mean, yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”  

“You wanna come along, Tess?” Scott asked, turning back toward her.  “You were saying this morning that you needed something from L’anse, weren’t you?”

“Sure, yeah,” Tessa replied, recognizing an out when she saw one.  “Are we leaving right now?”

“We can,” Scott answered.  

“Okay, I’ll come,” Tessa said.  “Just give me a minute to go change.”  She was probably going for casual, but her whole posture had perked up and her smile was way too wide, so Scott knew that nobody bought it. Meryl and Charlie’s eyes ping-ponged between Scott, Tessa, and one another as Tessa scooped up her things and hustled back into the cabin.  

And as soon as the screen door had snapped shut behind her, they were both on Scott like white on rice.  

“So this is gonna be, like, a whole _thing_ now, huh?” Charlie questioned.  He was frowning, and Scott could practically feel Meryl’s eyes boring through the back of his skull.  

Scott was already shaking his head before Charlie had finished his question.  “It’s not like that,” he replied.

“Not like that, huh?” Charlie quipped.  “Well, then, can Meryl and I come along on this little trip to L’anse?”

“No,” Scott replied, and he knew he’d responded too quickly from the way Charlie’s frown deepened.  “No,” he repeated, more gently this time. “No need for everyone to come along just to get some gas.”  

Charlie laughed bitterly, shaking his head.  “Whatever, man,” he drawled. “I’m just saying.  She’s your _partner._  And you _know_ she’s got a massive crush on you.  I’d just watch it, if I were you.”

Scott stood there in silence for a moment, completely taken aback.  This was _Charlie White_ , here.  Goofy, care-free, charmingly oblivious Charlie who had once forgotten his own wedding anniversary and then been baffled by his wife’s disappointment.  He’d barely spoken to Tessa outside of the rink at this point, Scott knew, but here he was anyhow, noticing things about her and trying to look out for her feelings.  Scott had either drastically underestimated the guy’s emotional sensitivity or drastically _over_ estimated how well he and T had been able to hide the tension between them at this age.  

“I’ll think about it,” Scott managed to choke out, after an indeterminately long pause.  

He was saved from having to say anything else, luckily, because at that moment Tessa emerged from the house, a flannel tied around her waist and her purse slung over her shoulder.  

“Ready to go?” Scott asked her, grinning.  And if his unreasonable happiness to see his partner had something to do with his discomfort at getting lectured by a teenage _Charlie White_ , of all people, then Tessa didn’t need to know.  

She nodded, smiling back, but her expression was pinched up in a way that rang a dull, old warning bell somewhere in the back of his head.  It was a face Tess hadn’t made since her early twenties, at least that he could recall; the last time he remembered seeing it was at a cafe in Canton, about two minutes before she’d told him she wanted to retire after Sochi.  

He managed to fight down the instinct to reel her into his side and hold her there as they walked to the car, but it was a close thing.

The strange sense of foreboding persisted as they pulled out of the long gravel drive, and it clung to them as Tessa reached forward to mess with the radio until she found a station she liked.  Her fingers were fidgety and inexact on the dials, and her eyes kept flicking over to his face and then away like she was afraid of being caught looking.

Scott was about three-fourths of the way to figuring her out, but that last twenty-five percent kept him quiet.  HIs Tessa-centric instincts were fine-tuned, and there had been plenty of times in the past when he’d been able to use them to discover what was happening with his partner before she figured it out herself.  But Tess had always resented the way he jumped to conclusions because of it; she hated it when he used their relationship to make assumptions about her feelings, but she hated it even more when he assumed and was _wrong._ It had taken him years, but he’d eventually discovered that the best way to deal with this sort of situation was to recognize what was happening and then just stay quiet and wait it out.  

It took about ten minutes.  Classic rock filtered out of the speakers, the volume almost inaudibly low, and a good stretch of pavement had spread out between them and the cabin before Tessa turned to him and broke the quiet.  

“So, what’s up?” she asked.  “Did you think of something else for the plan or what?”

And just like that, the last puzzle piece slotted into place in Scott’s brain.  “No,” he replied, as casually as he could. “I just thought you looked tired. Thought you could use a couple hours of peace and quiet.”

Tessa’s forehead crumpled, like Scott had just introduced a problem that she wasn’t equipped to solve.  “Huh,” she said. “Well, thanks.”

“Of course,” Scott responded.  And then, because it was important and because he knew he’d missed the mark on a hundred different forms of this conversation by the time Tess was this age, he took a deep breath, braced himself, and said “I care about you, too, not just the plan” in the gentlest voice he could muster.  

There was a long, stagnant moment that followed that statement, and Scott stared straight ahead at the road and let Tessa absorb it.  

“Oh,” she said finally, sounding stunned.  “I mean, I guess I…I thought that we...”

“It’s okay, T,” Scott cut in, before Tessa had the chance to get any more embarrassed.  He reached over and grabbed her hand, bringing it up to the steering wheel to squeeze it between his before letting it go.  “I just wanted to be sure you knew that. I know this is a strange situation, but I want to be clear that I’m not just hanging around because I need you to get back to the future.  I’m _also_ hanging around because you’re my partner and I care about you.  We’re in this together, always. Okay?”

Tessa made small choked-off sound in her throat and turned her entire body toward the window to hide her face.  Scott saw her expression in the reflection against the glass anyway, and it absolutely killed him that she looked ready to cry over something she should have _never_ had to doubt.  He remembered that these years had been hard for them, but he’d forgotten _how_ hard, especially for Tess.

He was just about to pull over onto the curb so that he could hug her when Tessa finally turned back to face him, her eyes damp and red.  She swiped at them with the back of her hand, embarrassed, and managed a tentative smile. “Okay,” she said.

Scott placed his hand back on the console between them, palm facing up.  Tessa slid hers into it, squeezed his fingers hard with hers, and didn’t let go.  “You wanna stop for ice cream while we’re in town?” he asked her.

Tessa nodded, her smile growing a little wider.  “Sure,” she said.

Then a Journey song came on the radio, the mood shifted, and they alternately sang and laughed for the rest of the drive.

\--

Back in their apartment in Montreal, the mysterious pain in Tessa’s shins had receded enough for her to get up and change out of her work clothes.  She only left Scott alone in the living room for a few minutes, but it was still enough time for him to start getting lost in his own head, his thoughts going a hundred different directions at once.  The weight of the day was finally starting to collapse down on him, he realized, and he was kind of freaking out. He wanted to tell Tess, but he also kind of wanted to lie down and pretend to be dead until she forgot about his existence.

“Hey,” Tessa said, entering and cutting into the quiet.  “What are you thinking about over there?”

She’d swapped her dress for sweatpants and a tank top, and her hair was tucked up into a bun on the top of her head.  If he didn’t look too hard, she almost looked like _his_ Tess, the way she might first thing in the morning or in the evening after a long practice.  The thought made his chest feel unexpectedly achy.

Scott shook his head, not knowing what to say.  “Nothing,” he replied, eventually. “Just...thinking in general.”

Tessa moved over to where he was still seated on the couch, her socked feet quiet on the wooden floor.  She was giving him this intense look, not through him this time but _right at him_ instead, something tender enough to make him want to turn away.  The fingers of her right hand came up to meet the side of his face, and her thumb glided over his jaw.  “Don’t hurt yourself, there,” she advised him sweetly.

Scott jerked away, a shocked laugh bubbling out of him.  “Hey!” he protested.

Tessa grinned, and Scott realized immediately that her distraction had worked.  “C’mon, Scott,” she said. “It’s dinnertime. Whatever you’re thinking about will be better on a full stomach.”  

She stepped back, then, and headed for the kitchen.  Scott stared quietly at the space she’d left for a moment, collected himself, and followed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope that this chapter felt like it came as-advertised: a little pause in the action for our two sets of partners. This also roughly marks the halfway point of the story, plot-wise. I'm hoping to get another (slightly longer) chapter up sometime this weekend, work permitting!


	9. Wednesday, Two Ways

Sometimes, Scott felt like he would never completely _know_ Tessa Virtue, like every time he thought he’d peeled back the last layer there would be another one hidden underneath.  But there were other times when he felt like he knew her so well that it bordered on frightening to contemplate.

Case and point: he was currently offering Tessa one of the napkins he’d stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans in anticipation of how she was letting her ice cream melt and drip all over the place.

That action didn’t come from the simple generalization that Tessa was always the world’s slowest eater; no, in fact, Scott had once watched his partner cram down an entire breakfast burrito in under two minutes while queueing at an airport terminal.  In actuality, the speed with which she ate was dependent on a number of factors, not least of which was the level of focus she gave the task. Which meant that now, distracted from her food by hiking and sightseeing and her own thoughts, she’d _become_ the world’s slowest eater.  And the fact that Scott knew that—and, worse still, that he _knew_ that he knew that—was probably enough to give a person a complex.  

Scott, however, liked to believe that time and effort had shaped him into a man who _worked through_ his complexes, and he’d already sorted his feelings on this particular issue some time ago.  He also believed that ice cream should never go to waste no matter what mood you were in, which is why he had finished his cone of strawberry soft serve a few miles back up highway 41.  

They’d filled up the gas can nearly two hours ago, but they’d been delaying the drive back to the house ever since.  First they’d stayed in town, walking the beach and shopping for groceries they didn’t need and (of course) going for ice cream at the Frostie Freeze.  But when they’d realized that they were having debate about whether or not they should go into a Shopko to _just walk around_ , they’d been forced to move on.  Luckily, there was a roadside park ten minutes’ drive south from the Shopko parking lot.  The park supposedly had the prettiest waterfall in Baraga county, and although Scott was skeptical of this statement he wasn’t skeptical enough to _not_ go and check it out.  

Which, of course, was how he’d ended up hiking along a rickety boardwalk through the woods near sunset while philosophising about Tessa’s eating habits.

“So I was thinking,” Tessa mused, after spooning another bite of tepid milk and fudge into her mouth.  

“About what?” Scott prompted.

“About the whole time-travel thing,” Tessa replied.  “I think I’ve got an idea about the pattern.”

“Yeah?” Scott asked.  They’d been talking about Scott’s situation on and off, between various distractions, and one of the things they’d been stuck on was the possibility of a pattern to when Scott jumped through time.  He’d formulated a few theories about it himself, and he was curious to see if Tessa’s ideas matched up with his.

“So there a number of similarities, obviously,” Tessa started, thoughtful.  “We’ve already talked about a lot of them. It’s only ever happened while both versions of you were asleep.  And while the two of us are together. And while we were at the house, too, with Charlie and Meryl right there near us.   But I think that we’ve been getting stuck because not all of those are important characteristics, necessarily—or maybe they’re making us _miss_ the important things, because we’re too focused on the pattern of what’s there _._  Maybe we should be focusing on what’s _not_ there.”  She paused, then, flicking her spoon between her thumb and forefinger in frustration.  “I’m not making sense, am I?”

“No, you are,” Scott assured her.  “I was just thinking the same thing.  I mean, why didn’t I switch back again after we went to bed last night?  We were both at the house, together, Meryl and Charlie were right there, and I’m _sure_ that I must’ve been asleep both here and in Montreal.  Maybe focusing on the times when it _didn’t_ happen will help us figure out the conditions we need for the switch to take place.”

“Exactly, yes!” Tessa half-shouted, whipping around to grin at him.  “You must be  _psychic_ or something.  I hadn’t even fully had that thought yet, Scott.”  

Scott smiled back, tapping his temple.  “Twenty-one years of experience, over here,” he reminded her.  Her eyes creased up at the corners immediately in response to his statement, and he took a moment to think fondly about the smile lines that expression would give her later.  It was jarring, like watching evolution in motion, and comforting in a way he couldn’t quite articulate.

“I can’t believe I keep forgetting about that,” she admitted, laughing.  “It’s almost unsportsmanlike, when you think about it. Although _I’m_ probably doing the same thing with my Scott right now, back in your time.”  

“Probably, yeah,” Scott agreed.  He liked to think that he was pretty good at getting a read on Tess, but his partner was _frighteningly_ good at reading his moods, too.  She’d always had an uncanny ability to react to him on the ice in exactly the way he needed—and it had saved both of their asses on more than one occasion.  The way she was able to use that skill in their off-ice life, picking up on the way he thought and acted and then altering her reactions to shift his mood, was a testament to how brilliant and perceptive she was.  She didn’t need to use this ability very often, thankfully, but the few occasions when she’d done it had made Scott aware that she was in a unique position of power when it came to him. With little more than a whim, she could dictate the kind of day he had, either for better or for worse; if he didn’t trust her, it would actually be kind of scary.

“What would we be doing right now, back in Montreal?” Tessa asked, breaking Scott out of his thoughts.  

Scott cocked his head and tried to mentally visualize their Google calendar, but Tessa must’ve mistook his thoughtfulness for something else because she was apologizing before he could respond.  

“Forget I asked,” she rushed in, putting her hands up between them.  “That was nosey.”

“It was,” Scott agreed, chuckling, “But I don’t care, T, since it’s your life, too.  I just had to think about it for a minute. Today’s Wednesday, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s Wednesday,” Tessa confirmed.  

“Well...we normally make dinner together on Wednesdays, if you get out of the office in time.  So we’d be in the kitchen, making pasta. You usually choose music for us to listen to while we cook, which could mean Hall and Oates’ greatest hits if you’re in the mood to irritate me, but usually it’s just oldies.  Then we would eat dinner, digest a little bit, and go work out. We run together sometimes, when the weather’s nice, but until it warms up we usually just go to the gym. Then it’s back home and right to bed; Thursdays are an early morning for us.”  Scott’s voice trailed off at the end, chagrined, as it dawned on him that this was a little more detail than Tessa had been looking for. He hadn’t realized that it would upset him to talk about this, but he found himself feeling more and more homesick the longer he spoke.  He hoped that Tess didn’t notice.

“That sounds nice,” Tessa said, gently.  Her smile had slipped a bit and there was something sharp and protective in the way her eyes scanned his face, and Scott knew immediately that she’d figured it out.  She reached over and took his hand, and the gesture made Scott feel simultaneously comforted and embarrassed.

He cleared his throat and looked away.  “It is,” he admitted, trying to keep it together.  “Anyway, let’s go see this waterfall, huh?” Scott questioned.  He squeezed her fingers in his and then let go, hoping that his partner would get the message to change the topic.

“Sure,” Tessa agreed.  

Then the moment passed, and Scott focused on the soft scuffing of his feet against the boardwalk as they continued down the path, following the line of the river.  The two of them were just walking along in silence, both preoccupied with their own thoughts, when Tessa suddenly perked up next to him with a massive smile on her face.  

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

Scott frowned and listened more carefully, trying to pick out whatever it was that had gotten Tessa so excited.  It took a moment, but when he strained his ears he realized that he could hear something, a vague roaring noise that broke through the quiet.  He nodded.

“I think it’s the waterfall,” Tessa said.  “We’re almost there.”

And then, with absolutely no warning at all, his partner tensed up and then just started _booking it_ down the path, laughing like a woman possessed.  

Scott paused for a moment, his brain catching up to what happened, and then he started running after her, shouting about the unfairness of her head start between breaths as he tried to catch up.  The boardwalk gave way to a dirt trail as it curved around a bend, and then the path abruptly ended at a small wooden fence, looking down the side of a massive cliff. The sound of roaring water was thunderous, and Scott stared ahead and realized that the river had suddenly dropped to a massive falls, plunging several hundred feet down the side of a cliff face into the valley below.  

“Wow,” Tessa breathed, propping a hand onto her hip.  She walked slowly up to the fence and leaned over to get a better look.  

“Wow,” Scott agreed.  He stayed back and watched Tessa as she looked out at the falls with such pure excitement and gave himself a moment to let the happiness and sadness he was feeling rip him in two.  He wondered if he’d be around to see that expression on her face tomorrow. He wondered if _his_ Tessa would’ve reacted the same way.  He wondered what she was doing back in Montreal, right at this moment, and if she was missing him as much as he was missing her.

\--

From his position in front of the stove, dutifully moving some diced onions back in forth in a pan of oil, Scott watched as his partner de-seeded and chopped a bell pepper with surgical precision.  She had the same expression on her face that she sometimes did pre-skate, a look of completely focused energy, and it was actually kind of terrifying to see that level of intensity directed at a piece of produce.  

A few moments later, Tessa poked her head over Scott’s shoulder, checking his progress, and then she wordlessly leaned in and used the edge of the knife to swipe the pepper into the pan.  The blade made a sharp sound as it moved against the cutting board and Tessa was literally pressed right up against him, completely task-oriented and smelling like sweat and shampoo and red pepper, and Scott realized with no small amount of horror that this was really freaking _attractive,_ somehow.  And, of course, that feeling was immediately followed by the thought _that’s my fianc_ _é_ _e_ , which elicited a strange mixed bag of fear, pride, and awe in him that was even harder to process.  

He swallowed, keeping his eyes studiously trained on the pan in front of him as he tried to stomp the feelings down, but he knew that Tessa had picked up on something because she had this clearly _smug_ smile on her face as she pulled away to check on the pasta on the other burner.  

She turned to him with a playful expression, then, and Scott had a moment of panic that she was going to bring it up somehow, but instead she just said, “What’s the best meal you’ve ever had?”

Scott sighed with relief and then went on to give Tessa a detailed description of a truly transcendent burger as he continued to push various ingredients around in a pan.  As Tessa added some crushed tomatoes to the mix and stole his spatula to test for seasoning, she (somewhat unbelievably) informed him that this had been topped last year in Korea by a particularly good plate of bulgogi beef.  

Then, because Scott was all about distractions at this point, he decided to keep the game going.  He reciprocated by asking her about the best vacation she’d ever been on and listened intently as Tess told him about her first trip to Paris.  (She hadn’t made it there yet at sixteen, so Scott relayed that her past self would have probably said “somewhere tropical”, a true Virtue family classic.)  They kept this up, pausing occasionally for Tess to give him directions before going back to bouncing questions back and forth, and the conversation made things easier, somehow, because the rest of the dinner prep went off pretty much without a hitch.  

“Favorite movie,” Tessa prompted as she transferred the pasta to a serving bowl, and Scott pointedly ignored the way his eyes traced the line of her collarbone as she tipped the strainer.  “Also, you can start taking stuff to the table.”

“Bloodsport,” he replied after a moment, grinning at her and grabbing a hotpad to take the sauce off the stove.  Easy.

Tessa laughed.  “Of course,” she said.  She gathered some plates and silverware and passed them both off to Scott before circling back to the kitchen to retrieve the pasta and salad.  

“Same or different?” Scott asked her retreating back.

“Same,” Tessa called back.  She materialized a moment later with the rest of their dinner, a bowl propped in the crook of each elbow.

“What about you?” Scott questioned.

Tessa placed the bowls down gently, one at a time, before responding.  “That’s not the game,” she told him very seriously, but Scott was getting better at identifying the way her eyes crinkled up in the corners when she was trying to tease him, and he wasn’t fooled.

“Humor me,” Scott insisted, laughing.  

“Hm,” Tessa hummed.  “Moulin Rouge, probably.”

“Huh,” Scott replied, “It’s the same.  Haven’t any better movies come out since then?”

Tessa smirked and subtly raised an eyebrow.  “Need I remind you that _your_ favorite movie was released the year after you were born.”

“You’ve got me on that one,” Scott admitted.  

There was a lull in the conversation after that, interrupted only by the clacking of silverware against ceramic as they plated their food and then dug in, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.  It felt familiar, the way eating with Tessa was always familiar.

“This is good,” Scott said after a while, the realization coming to him mid-chew.  “Hard to believe I taught you this.”

“A friend of ours gave you the recipe,” Tessa replied.  “He said it was something simple enough that even we couldn’t mess it up.”  

“So our cooking skills don’t improve, then?” Scott checked.  He was trying to be more careful about toeing this line now that he’d scared the shit out of himself once by finding out too much about the future, but he didn’t see how cooking tips would impact anything.  And Tessa had been the one to bring it up.

“Not much, no,” Tessa agreed.  “I no longer burn toast, at least.  Or...well, I do it less frequently than I used to.”

“That’s good to hear,” Scott said, rolling his eyes.

After that, a light cheeriness settled over them and stayed, and they alternately ate and made stop-start bursts of small talk between bites, sometimes more questions for the “now and then” game and sometimes just little bits of conversation.  They probably would have managed to get through the entire dinner that way, actually, if Scott hadn’t then gone ahead and jammed his foot right into his mouth.

“What’s the best gift you’ve ever received,” he proposed, flicking a bit of onion aside with his fork.

Tessa had already cleaned her plate, but Scott still managed to catch her midway through a sip of water.  She took her time with swallowing and setting down the glass before she replied. “I’ll tell you the second-best,” she compromised.  

“Why?” Scott questioned, his curiosity piqued.  “Was the best gift from me?”

“It was,” Tessa confirmed.  “But you haven’t given it to me yet.”

“Is that why you can’t tell me about it?” he asked.

“Yes,” Tessa replied.  Her eyes went a bit soft, and then she was giving him that intense expression he was starting to recognize, the one where she looked at him like she was seeing something that he couldn’t.  “It was so...sweet. I wouldn’t want you to do it because you know I liked it; I want you to have thought of it on your own. I want it to be genuine.”

“Oh,” Scott responded, realizing in a burst of inspiration _exactly_ what the gift probably was, and he could feel it as the mood in the room shifted and both of them lapsed into their own thoughts.

He had no idea what Tess was thinking about, honestly, but _he_ was definitely wondering if this was the ideal time to bring up the whole engagement ring thing before he went insane.  They were getting on so well that he almost didn’t want to do it, but he’d also literally just short-circuited while watching Tess _dice peppers_ less than twenty minutes ago, so things were probably going to start falling apart soon.  And he hated lying, hated lying to T even more, and hated lying to her about important stuff the most, and…

“I know we’re engaged,” Scott blurted out, shocking them both.  

Tessa stared across the table at him and her face had gone incredibly, terrifyingly blank.  “What makes you think that?” she asked him. Her voice was just as suspiciously neutral as her face, and the combination of those two things scared the shit out of Scott so completely that he thought he might have an aneurysm.  

“I saw the ring,” Scott admitted, the confession flowing naturally out of him.  “Behind your bedside table, in the bedroom. I saw your engagement ring.”

Tessa sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers.  “Why, exactly, were you looking behind the bedside table?” she asked.

“Because I was curious,” Scott admitted.  “And I promised I wouldn’t check the internet or TV anything, so I just was kind of...looking around the house, I guess?”

“You promised me that you wouldn’t pry, Scott,” she reminded him, sounding suddenly very tired.  “That includes _any_ kind of digging into the future, not just TV and the internet.”

“I know that, and I’m really sorry, T.  I am. But I just...I wanted you to know that I know.  And it’s...it’s okay, seriously! I’ll try not to think about it or whatever, but you don’t have to pretend to not be engaged for my benefit, okay?”

“Scott,” Tessa said, speaking slowly, “I’m neither confirming nor denying that we’re engaged.”

“I saw the _ring_ , T,” Scott responded.  “I _know._ Seriously, it’s alright.”

“People can have rings for any number of reasons,” Tessa told him cryptically.  

“Diamond rings in those little engagement-style boxes,” Scott stated flatly.  “People can have _those_ for any number of reasons?”

“They can,” Tessa confirmed, and there was such a strong sense of conviction in her voice that it actually made Scott hesitate.  He knew Tessa was probably trying to be ambiguous on purpose, but there was something about the tone of her voice that made him think that maybe they _weren’t_ engaged, somehow.  But that was...well, actually that was kind of terrible news.  Because if T had an engagement ring and it wasn’t from Scott, then...

“Tess, are we together?” Scott asked, quietly.  He realized that this was probably a ridiculous question, considering that they appeared to be living together and Tessa had tried to kiss him twice and he’d woken up next to her in bed this morning with literal _nail marks_ on his back, but suddenly he found himself really, truly starting to question it.

“We agreed that we shouldn’t talk about the future, Scott,” Tessa said, sounding disappointed and a little too evasive, and well _now_ Scott was starting to get nervous for real.  

“No, I know, I know,” he agreed quickly. “I know, you told me that talking about the future is off-limits or whatever and I _get_ that, Tess, but I think it actually might be worse for me if I don’t figure out what’s going on, here.  I mean, we live together, I _think_ , and we’re together, I _think,_ but I also _thought_ that you having an engagement ring meant that we were engaged, so maybe I’m wrong about this, too.”  He popped up from his seat and started to pace, feeling it as he got worked up without really understanding why.  He felt like he was going to vomit. Or cry. Or one and then the other. “I’m...I’m freaking a little here, T. And I’m not asking for anything major at all; I’m not asking if we’ve won the Olympics or if half of my family died in a plane crash of if there’s been, like, a third world war.  I just...can’t you just give me this? Please?”

“Scott, you’re getting worked up,” Tessa said, pulling herself up to standing and stepping over to interrupt his path, “Take a breath first.  Okay?”

She reached for him, probably for a hug, but Scott jerked away before she could.  He didn’t know at what point he’d made the transition from _freaked out_ to _pissed off_ , but he suddenly found himself well on the other side of that line and ready to go full loose-cannon.  “ _Yeah,_ I’m worked up!” he snapped, stepping right around her to keep pacing.  He was starting to shout, now, his voice getting louder with each passing moment, and he knew it wasn’t right but he couldn’t _help it_ .  “And you know why?  Because I don’t know  _anything!_ I’m completely in the dark, here, because you asked me to be.  And it’s starting to piss me the hell off! I’m freaking out and I am _mad_ about it and I am _mad at you_ for making me freaked out and angry!”

“Scott,” Tessa said, her voice cracking with some emotion that Scott didn’t have the mental headspace to identify, “You agreed to do this.  You _agreed_ that this was the best way until we figure out a better plan.”

“No, I didn’t,” Scott yelled, feeling like he was about half a second from losing his mind.  “You _told me_ everything and I just sat there while you fucking _steamrolled_ right over me like it didn’t matter and said _nothing_ and you thought that _that_ meant I was cool with it.  But I’m not! I’m _not_ cool with it.  This is not a good plan, Tessa!  This is bullshit! This whole thing is total _bullshit!_ ”

Tessa just stood there for a moment, staring at him like he was from another planet.  And then she swallowed hard, and Scott could feel the immediate shock of regret in his gut as he realized that she was holding something back and that the _something_ was probably _tears._  “I’m going to go,” Tessa said, her voice hard and steely.  “Because I have errands to run, but also because I need to be away from you right now.  We will talk _rationally_ about this when I get back.  But you do _not_ get to talk to me that way, Scott Moir.”  

“Tess,” he pled, suddenly desperate as he watched her turn away from him and collect her things to leave.

She flinched but didn’t respond, stuffing her feet into a pair of rain boots and zipping up her jacket.  She opened the door with purpose, all but throwing it back, and then froze about halfway out and whipped her head suddenly around, her eyes clamping onto Scott’s.  “Don’t leave the apartment,” she told him, and the authority in that command was something he’d never felt from her before.

Scott just nodded, his jaw locked, as he felt the fear and anger and remorse all coursing through him, vying for control.  He felt like if he opened his mouth to speak he would start screaming again, so he said nothing else as she turned back around, walked out the door, and left.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this chapter is out a bit later than I intended, but not due to work. A friend surprised me with Stars On Ice tickets this weekend, and I don't live in Canada so it was a bit of a drive to get to the show (which, by the way, was absolutely amazing)!! 
> 
> The next update is already in the works, so there will probably be another new chapter by this Friday.


	10. Rain and Resolution

Scott spent the first five minutes after Tessa left fuming and stewing in his own resentments, but he didn’t have enough energy to sustain that feeling forever, so eventually his anger began to dissipate and give way to a very different emotion—not guilt, exactly, but definitely something guilt-tangential.  Regret, probably. And not just because he’d managed to piss off the only person in the world who wouldn’t think he was insane for having no memory of the past thirteen years, although that certainly played a role.

The thing was that he was still a little ticked off even once his head had cleared a bit, but not just at Tess.  He understood her desire to keep him out of the loop, to a point—trying to fuck up the future at little as possible _did_ sound reasonable, for sure—but that didn’t mean that the curiosity and restlessness weren’t absolutely eating him alive.  At some point, they both had to realize that Scott being in the future at all was definitely going to mess with things regardless of how hard they tried to isolate him from the situation.  And besides, he couldn’t stay fake-sick forever, so if they didn’t sort out this whole time travel thing soon then all of this sneaking around and hiding would be for nothing.

The other thing, though, was that he _hadn’t_ said any of that to Tess.  Instead, he’d name-called and sworn and yelled and pinned all of his frustration on her, even though he _knew_ that she was probably just trying to help them both.  It wasn’t like anybody had given either of them an instruction manual on how to cope with any of this, after all.  

So, yeah, maybe he _did_ feel a little guilty, actually.  Because she was his partner and loved and respected her or whatever, and he’d been kind of a dick to her, which wasn’t cool even if T had kind of been a dick to him, too.  

Somewhere in the middle of having this whole realization, Scott noticed that it had started to rain outside—not just a little drizzle, either, but a full downpour that sounded almost heavy enough to be hail on the roof, complete with thunder and lightning.  Scott peered out the window into the windy, wet maelstrom and thought of Tessa, who was probably speed-walking around downtown Montreal with her face all pinched up like it always got when she was caught up in her own head. He didn’t know if she’d taken an umbrella with her.  And the sun had gone down. And it was getting _cold_ outside, dammit.  

Any residual irritation he’d been feeling evaporated almost instantly, leaving only concern behind.  Was her jacket warm enough? Did she have anything with her that shouldn’t be getting wet? Were her legs hurting her again, like they’d been when she got home from work?  

Scott spent the next twenty minutes frantically zipping around the apartment, trying to come up with tasks to distract himself from his own anxiety.  He restlessly put away their dinner leftovers. He restlessly did the dishes. He restlessly checked the weather channel on the TV, and restlessly watched the animation of the massive storm front sweeping in on the radar.  And then, realizing that this last task was only making him more anxious, he turned the TV off again and gave up and started to pace the apartment.

And then the door was abruptly thrown open, and Tessa was standing in it.  She looked halfway drowned, her expression icy and her chest heaving and water running off of her drenched clothes into a puddle on the floor.  She stooped down to peel off her rain boots, and the second they were off of her feet she was staring down at them like they’d personally wronged her.

The relief that coursed through Scott was so strong that it felt like a physical weight had been taken off of his chest.

“Tessa!” he laughed, rushing forward to latch onto her and squeeze her.

“I’m going to get you all wet,” Tessa protested.  But there was no real strength in the words, and less than a second later she locked her arms around his neck and pressed her chilly nose into his throat.  She took a deep inhale, her whole body expanding with it, and then slumped against him as she blew it out with a sigh.

“Don’t care,” Scott replied, unnecessarily.  One of his hands fisted a handful of damp jacket fabric near the small of her back and the other one came to rest against the base of her neck, her skin cool under his palm.  Tessa’s whole body was shivering so much that it felt like she was vibrating against him.

“I’m going to go get changed,” Tessa said after a moment.  She took a step back and Scott let her, but he reached out immediately to place his hands on her arms, rubbing up and down even though he knew that the motion wasn’t doing anything to warm her up through several layers of fabric.  “I’m _freezing_.”  

“Yeah, of course,” Scott agreed, forcing himself to pull away.  “Go ahead. I’ll...be here.”

Tessa nodded and then shuffled down the hall to the bedroom, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind her.  While she was gone, Scott went to the kitchen and used a dish towel to mop up the floor, his father having given him more than enough lectures about what happened when you let water sit on hardwood.  By the time he was done Tessa had reemerged, this time in a set of flannel pyjamas.

She gave him a small, hesitant, _familiar_ smile that pulled at every last one of his heartstrings, and suddenly it was impossible for Scott to _not_ hug her again.  

So he did.  Enthusiastically.

“Hi,” Tessa said a while later, her voice muffled from where it was pressed into the front of his t-shirt.

Scott smiled and squeezed his arms tighter around her, not stopping until it was borderline painful, and he reveled in the way Tessa laughed in response.  “Hi,” he said back, lightness bubbling up in his chest, and then, finally, he felt like his heart had calmed down enough to let her go.

Her eyes found his immediately, and she opened her mouth to start saying something, but Scott rushed to beat her to the punch.  

“I’m sorry I yelled,” he told her, sincerely.  “And that I blamed you. It wasn’t right for me to do.  I’m just...I just got really frustrated. That’s not an excuse or anything, I know, but...”

“I’m sorry I made you feel like you _had_ to yell,” Tessa replied, just as genuine.  She took Scott’s right hand between both of hers and pressed it tightly in reassurance.  “Maybe we should start by talking through things a little bit more, huh?”

Scott nodded.  “Yeah, please,” he agreed, and then he let Tess drag him over to the couch.  She let go of his hand to arrange herself, tucking her legs under her body, and Scott was unreasonably happy when she reached out to reclaim it after she’d settled, her thumb smoothing over his knuckles.  

“You go first,” Tessa instructed him.  Her voice was calm and measured, and she stared steadily at him as she waited.

Scott took a deep breath and tried to absorb a little bit of her calm, and then everything just sort of started tumbling out of him all at once.  The fear of being trapped here, and of messing up the future by doing so. The frustration at the whole situation. The complete uselessness and claustrophobia he’d felt as he sat and waited around the apartment.  The anxiety that he’d still be here at the end of the week, and that he wouldn’t be prepared to function in his life here.

“I just feel like I don’t know what I’m doing and that everything’s already so messed up anyway that it doesn’t even matter what I know,” he summarized.  “I mean...no matter what, this is going to change our future, I think. This whole thing is one huge problem, and I don’t want you to have to figure everything out by yourself, but I don’t know how to help because I don’t even know how I should _act_ around you right now.”

Tessa listened intently, and she never let go of his hand.  After he stopped speaking, she took a moment just to think, and Scott watched her face transition through about five different expressions before finally smoothing out again.  

“You’re probably right,” Tessa admitted.  She kept her eyes trained on a spot somewhere to the left of Scott’s head, and her jaw was clenched tight.  “I know that you being here is going to change the way that things happen for us once you get back to your own time, and that’s exactly what I’m afraid of, Scott, because I’m, well…”  Tessa stopped, taking a deep breath. “I’m _very_ attached to the way our lives are now.  There are so many moments that shaped relationship that we have, both good ones and bad ones, and we needed every one of them in order to get to the place where we are today.  I was afraid— _am_ afraid—that something that happens to you while you’re here will change everything for us.  I just hoped that if I could keep you as disconnected as possible, then maybe…”

“Then maybe nothing would change,” Scott finished, nodding.  “Thus the ban on learning about the future.”

“Thus the ban on learning about the future,” Tessa agreed.  

“God, this sucks,” Scott sighed, letting his head drop back against the couch.  

“It does,” Tessa admitted.  Her eyes flicked to his face briefly, and she offered him a crooked, sad smile.  “I have no idea how to fix this, Scott.” Her broke cracked a bit on his name, giving her away, and when Scott looked at her he realized eyes were getting shiny and her chin was starting to wobble.  

“Don’t cry, T,” he begged her helplessly, swallowing hard around the lump that was suddenly forming in his throat.  “Please, _please_ don’t cry.”

Tessa let out a little choked-out half laugh and tilted her eyes up toward the ceiling, taking a deep breath.  “Sorry,” she said, her voice low and hoarse. “Just...give me a minute.” Her chest rose and fell in sharp, shuddering gasps of breath, and she kept her eyes fixed upward, their rims getting progressively redder each time she blinked.  

Scott watched in absolute terror as a single tear slipped out and made its way down her cheek, and yep, shit, this was it.  He could feel the tears welling up in his own eyes immediately, halfway out of sympathy and halfway due to his own frustration.  

He flipped his hand in Tessa’s and used the point of connection to pull her forward and into his chest, hiding his face in her hair as he hugged her tight.  He spent the next few moments trying to control his breathing and swiping at his eyes as inconspicuously as possible. _This is so embarrassing,_ he couldn’t help but think.  He’d been completely off a wall for the past two days, Tess had been here to see every minute of it.   _She must think I’m insane._

“You know I love you, right?” Tessa asked him, her voice quiet but confident as it broke through his thoughts.  “Always. I know I’ve been keeping things from you, but I don’t ever want you to have to worry about how I feel about you.  That hasn’t changed. I loved you when I was sixteen and I love you now and I’ve loved you every year in between.”

Her cheek pressed against his neck as she spoke, warm and familiar, and that sensation paired with her words was making Scott feel like he was about to choke on his own lungs.  He was actually crying, now, the tears fucking _punched_ right out of him by whatever the hell this feeling was.  He squeezed Tessa tighter in response, trying to convey a gratitude that he didn’t know how to articulate.  

“We can get through this, right?” he questioned, after a while.  “If we do it together?”

“Together, always,” Tessa replied, the response so quick that it seemed almost automatic.  

“Promise?” Scott questioned.  He could feel Tessa’s chest rising and falling, and he was surprised to find that it had slipped into the same rhythm as his.  

“I promise,” Tessa told him.  

\--

Scott woke up with a crick in his neck and Tessa’s deep, even breathing loud in his ear.  The credits to _Moulin Rouge!_ were rolling on the TV in front of him, and the throw blanket from the couch was tucked around the two of them, sealing them into a little cocoon of warmth.  His adrenaline had ramped up at first as he became disoriented by the changed surroundings, but the weight of Tessa’s body against his crushed the feeling right back down.

He tipped his head to the side, craning his neck to press his lips to her temple.  “T?” he whispered. He turned his body a bit, causing Tessa to sag back into his chest, and Scott took advantage of the change in position to press more kisses into her skin, against the side of her face and down her neck, as he hugged her against his body.

Tessa woke up by degrees, just fidgeting at first, and then her eyes squinted open and she arched her back into a long, languous stretch.  “ _Scott_?” she questioned, her voice hopeful but still raspy with sleep.  

“Hey, there,” he murmured, hunching downard to brush his lips gently against hers.  

Tessa sighed against his mouth and went comfortably lax against him.  “You’re home,” she said.

Scott nodded; he felt almost blindsided by relief. “I am,” he agreed.  His fingers trailed up the side of Tessa’s arm, gooseflesh forming in their wake, as he peered over at the clock.  “Asleep at nine PM, huh? That’s an early bedtime even for you, kiddo.”

“Well,” Tessa grumbled, pausing halfway through her thought to flip herself around and mash her face into his chest, “I’ve had a long day.”  

Scott’s hands migrated from her arms to her back, and they smoothed up and down her spine as he he tilted his head down to press a kiss to her hair.  “I’ll bet,” he hummed. “You certainly drew the short straw, compared to taking a vacation with you at sixteen. I can’t imagine it’s been easy.”

Tessa’s laughter vibrated against his skin in response, quiet but warm.  She tipped her head sideways slightly to press a kiss against his t-shirt right over his heart.  “Easy isn’t the word I would use, no,” she admitted. “I had to leave you alone for most of the day to go to work and I think you went a little stir-crazy.”  

“No surprise there,” Scott chuckled.  “I was worried about what I was going to do with this much time off even _before_ this whole situation.”

“To be fair, I didn’t really leave you with much to do,” Tessa added.  “No internet, limited TV, no snooping around...I was practically _asking_ for trouble.”

Scott frowned at that, uncomprehending.  “Why all the rules?” he asked, curious.

“Hm?” Tessa grumbled.  She propped her chin on his sternum, quirking an eyebrow at him.  “What do you mean?”

“I mean, why the whole no internet, no TV business?  Don’t tell me you’re worried about the impact of too much screen time on my brain development.  EIghteen isn’t _that_ young, T.”

Tessa rolled her eyes at that.  “Of course not, Scott,” she replied.  “I’m worried about controlling what you know about the future.  You know, so it doesn’t mess up our whole lives?”

Scott felt himself freeze, going completely rigid.   _Oh shit._  

“Scott?” Tessa questioned.

He didn’t respond, suddenly thinking of every little detail that he’d been so freely divulging to Tessa’s younger self.  The timeline. Their whole lives. Jesus christ on a cracker, what if he’d fucked up their _whole lives_?!

“Scott,” Tessa repeated.  Her eyes were starting to get wide, like they did when she was deciding whether or not to panic.  “Scott, what is it?”

“I didn’t even _think_ about that,” he confessed.  “I didn’t even bother to _think_ about that at all.  I’m so sorry, T. I’ve just been...I mean, I haven’t been telling you _everything_ about our lives, of course, but I’ve definitely shared enough.  I mean, I’ve talked about our work, our apartment, our friends. I’ve told you about a _ton_ of shit.”  

Tessa froze.  There was a strange expression on her face, not quite panicked but about halfway there.  Scott waited in tense silence for storm that was about to hit. God, T was going to be so mad—and justifiably so.  He should’ve thought of this, he should’ve anticipated this concern, he should’ve…

The feeling of Tessa’s head thunking down against his chest stopped his thoughts in their tracks.  “You’ve got to be fucking _kidding me_ ,” she groaned.  But she didn’t sound upset.  She sounded...huh. Exasperated, maybe?  But also...amused? That couldn’t be right.  Her body started shaking on top of his, and it took him a very long moment to realize that she was laughing.  

“Tess?” Scott checked, “Are you okay?  I’m really sorry, honestly, it just never crossed my mind to...”

“Yep,” Tessa interrupted, between fits of giggles.  “Seriously, Scott, it’s okay. I don’t blame you for not having thought of it right away.  But I’m just”—and here she broke off to burst into another fit of uncontrollable laughter, which she quickly wrestled down—“I’m just thinking about all the _time_ and the _energy_ that I’ve been putting into trying to keep everything from you.  And how much trouble it’s caused. I mean...god, I _cried_ about it today _._  And I could’ve just been…”  She paused again here, shaking her head.  

“You _cried_ today?” Scott cut in, unable to help himself from latching onto that bit of information.  “Tess, what happened?”

“Nothing,” Tessa dismissed, shaking her head.  “It was nothing, Scott.”

“No,” Scott insisted, frowning.  He _hated_ it when she pulled this shit, when she tried to mask the impact of things like this for his sake.  He hated it when she hid anything from him, actually, but he especially hated it when the thing she was hiding was herself.  He hooked an arm around Tessa’s waist and reeled her up his body until they were face to face, their noses brushing, and then he pressed a firm, quick kiss to her mouth.  “It’s _not_ nothing, Tess, or you wouldn’t have been upset.  Tell me what happened.”

Tessa’s eyes locked onto his, trying to gauge how serious he was.   _Really?_ her expression said.

He met her gaze steadily, patiently.   _Really_ , came his reply, clear as day.

Tessa sighed and gave in.  “It was a misunderstanding,” she said.  “You and I were talking about things I couldn’t tell you and you got frustrated, and the whole thing just got blown a little out of proportion.  That’s all.”

“So it was _me_ ,” Scott stated, trying to keep his voice level as anger bubbled up hotly in his chest.  “ _I_ made you cry.  God, I know that I…”  He cut himself off, and he clenched his jaw tightly as he tried to figure out how the hell he planned on finishing that sentence.  He was so fucking _pissed_ that he would do that.  That he would upset Tessa so much that he brought her to _tears_ when she was only trying to help him and do what was best for him.  It made him so angry that he wanted to punch something—preferably himself, circa 2006.  

“Scott, stop it,” Tessa snapped, clearly picking up on the direction of his thoughts.  “Look at me. Please.”

He didn’t want to, but he managed to raise his eyes from where he was scowling into his own chest to meet Tessa’s.  He found her staring up at him, her expression soft and warm and so full of love that he couldn’t help but melt a little under her gaze.

“You aren’t giving yourself enough credit, you know,” she told him, unbelievably.  

Scott scoffed and rolled his eyes, but Tessa blazed on ahead anyway.

“It’s true,” she insisted.  “You weren’t perfect today, but neither was I.  Almost all the time, you’ve been nothing but sweet and kind, and you’ve only been trying to make the best of a very difficult situation, the same as I have.  Do you know what the first thing you did was after we fought, Scott?”

Scott cringed, not liking the implied confirmation that he’d been _fighting_ with Tessa.  He knew what _fight_ meant in the context of his eighteen-year-old self, and it wasn’t pleasant.  And he also knew how much it affected her when he got mad, how much she took it to heart when he raised his voice with her.

“Scott,” Tessa prompted, snapping his attention back to her.  Her eyebrows were climbing up her forehead in clear exasperation, and her smile was a little strained.  “Scott, the first thing you did was _apologize to me_.  Right away.  And then we talked through what happened and worked out a solution so that it wouldn’t happen again.  We moved past it, and everything was fine.”

Scott opened his mouth to argue, still a little too pissed at his younger self to simply let this slide.  

“No,” Tessa insisted, anticipating him.  “You’re already forgiven. Let it go.” And then she leaned in, cupped his chin in her hand, and proceeded to kiss him with such single-minded determination that it was all he could do to just hold onto her and ride the wave.  When Tessa drew back some time later, her lips were red and damp as they lingered against his, her hands had migrated into his hair, and they’d both lost track of a significant proportion of their clothing.

He stared up at her, dazed, and couldn’t help but grin when he saw the wide smile on her face.  “God I love you,” he told her, stretching up to brush his mouth against hers one more time.

“I love you too,” Tessa replied, easy as you please.  She let the moment sit between them for a while, her thumb rubbing lazily against the shell of his ear.  And then she very suddenly popped up off of his lap and started walking away from him and down the hall, wearing just her bright red underwear and a puffy pair of house socks.

“Where are you going?” Scott called after her.  He probably could’ve done a better job of _not_ ogling her as she left, but where was the fun in that?

“To the bed,” Tessa replied, not bothering to turn around.  “That couch is bad for your back.”

He shot up right away, grinning, and followed after her.

 

An hour or so later, Scott found himself leaning against the doorframe of their bathroom, watching Tess spit toothpaste into the sink.  

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, as she wiped the corner of her mouth with her thumb.  She turned to face him with her toothbrush still in hand and gave him the least subtle once-over possible, her eyes sliding from his face all the way down to his toes.  

“Have you?” Scott quipped, flexing subtly.  “What about?”

“About that ring you gave me,” Tessa replied.  Her tone was casual, almost frighteningly so, but her eyes were wide and earnest.  “Maybe it’s time I started wearing it.”

Scott gripped the edge of the door tightly, afraid that he’d pass out if he let go.  His heart was beating so loudly that all he could hear was the rush of blood in his ears.  “Tessa,” he gasped, “Do you mean it?”

Tessa nodded.  “I mean it,” she told him.  Her cheeks had gone pink, and the beginning of a smile was creeping up at the corners of her mouth.  “Is that okay? I know the timing’s pretty awful, and...” she trailed off, lifting one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug.

“Is that...is…are you _kidding me?_ ” Scott spluttered.  And then he rushed forward, scooping Tessa up into his arms and swinging her around as much as their cramped bathroom would allow.  

Tessa clung to him and laughed, and he joined her, and by the time he set her down they were both laughing and clinging to one another and _bawling their eyes out_ —not just a few tears, either, but full-on _sobbing_.  When they managed to peel themselves apart a while later, their faces were red and blotchy and they were both shaking and Tessa was still holding onto her toothbrush somehow, grasping it tightly in her left hand.  

It felt like what might very well be the best moment of Scott’s life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has taken place fully in the present, but we'll be getting back to our friends in the past on the next update.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me this far! The plan right now is (probably) 4 more chapters until the end, so we're getting fairly close to the finish. I'm hoping to get the next chapter up by the end of this week, if everything goes to plan!


	11. Goodbye and Goodnight

Scott stood just inside the door and took a moment to drink in the sight of his partner, her hair piled up messily on the top of her head and her eyebrows knitted together as she tried to focus on the words on the page in front of her.  She was attempting to re-read Pride and Prejudice, but she didn’t appear to be having much luck; her eyes had that far-off glaze to them, and she was fidgeting with her ring, twisting it around on her finger with the thumb and forefinger of her other hand.

Scott would have been tempted to ask what was on her mind if he hadn’t been in a similar headspace himself.  Thirteen years and a thousand miles away, he was still stuck on his young partner back in Michigan—thinking himself in circles about the last thing he’d said to her, the plans they’d made for the future, and what she was doing right now with his younger self.  He knew it was strange, considering how desperately he’d wanted to get back to his own time and his own Tessa while he was away, but he found himself missing Tess’s younger self. They’d both changed so much since she’d been sixteen that it had almost felt like getting to know her all over again; only now did he realize that the time he’d spent with her had been a gift.  

And, as tended to happen, it seemed as though Tessa’s mind had followed a similar path.  Scott remembered the fond expression that had taken over Tessa’s face when she’d spoken about her day with the younger Scott and the fierceness with which she’d defended his actions.  And he recognized the softness in her face now, the pensive look of a woman who was caught between memories. It would seem as though her soft spot for his teenage self hadn’t dissipated with age.

“Can I turn off the light?” Scott asked, and he watched as Tessa jumped and shook herself out of her thoughts.  

She reached over to turn on her bedside light, angling it toward the page in front of her.  “Sure,” she said.

Scott smiled and flipped the switch, and Tessa turned over his side of the comforter as he walked toward the bed.  As Scott slid under the covers, snuggling down against his pillow, he curled onto his side to get a good look at Tessa’s face in profile under the soft lamplight.  She looked so peaceful and unguarded like this, nestled into their bed at the end of the day, in a way that nobody else got to see. It made him feel like the luckiest bastard alive.

Unable to help himself, he wormed over into her space on the bed, nuzzling his nose into her side as he wrapped his arms and legs around her like a clinging vine.  

“Scott!” she hissed, jerking away as his cold toes pressed against her calf.  

“Tess!” Scott mimicked, pressing his mouth to the flare of her hip bone and enduring her sigh of exasperation.  He dragged himself closer still, shoving his head into her lap and pressing his weight flat onto her legs in an attempt to get as much skin-on-skin as possible.  

Tessa was all too familiar with his antics, so she simply raised her book up, giving him room to maneuver.  Once Scott finally found a comfortable position, with his face pressed into the curve of her stomach and his arms locked around her back and his legs tangled up in hers, she wordlessly placed the spine of her book on top of his head and continued to read.  

Scott would have been offended by how easily she treated him like a human lap desk, but she shifted a minute later, and then the fingers of one hand carded through his hair as she held her book with the other.  He pressed a kiss to her abdomen and nuzzled closer, and Tessa dragged her nails lightly over his scalp in response, scratching fondly.

“What time do you have to leave in the morning?” Scott asked.  His thoughts were starting to get a little hazy, lulled into relaxation by a combination of Tessa’s hand against his hair and the warmth of her body below him.

“Not until ten,” Tessa replied.  Her thumb smoothed over his cheek, and Scott turned up to get a look at the soft smile he knew would be on her face.  

“Ten?” Scott quipped.  “Jeez, what a slacker.”

Tessa snorted and laughed.  “I have that photoshoot with Adidas, remember? I’m trying to maximize my beauty rest.”  

“Joke’s on you, then,” Scott responded.  He turned his head in toward Tessa’s hand to kiss her palm.  “Because you’re always beautiful.”

Tessa chuckled flicked his ear, and Scott responded by giving her his best fake-offended face.  “You old sap,” she said lovingly.

“Yep,” Scott agreed.  “What’s on your agenda after that?”

“Nothing,” Tessa replied.  “I’m...well, I rescheduled the rest of my appointments for the week, actually, so I don’t have anything until Monday.”  

“Really?” Scott questioned.

Tessa nodded.  “Really. I wanted to have some time to try and figure things out with the younger you, I suppose.  And trying to squeeze that time in around my daily life wasn’t very effective.”

“Well, that works out well for me now,” Scott mused.  “Now I can monopolize you all weekend.” In the back of his head, a nebulous plan was already beginning to form.

“That relies on you still _being here_ this weekend,” Tessa reminded him, frowning for the first time.  “I don’t know if we can rely on that.”

“You don’t think so?” Scott asked.  He leaned back, feeling himself sober, and angled his head up to get a better view of Tessa’s face.  

“I don’t know,” Tessa replied.  “We thought everything was back to normal last time you came back to me, and then we went to sleep and I woke up and you were gone again.  I don’t know if we can assume that this is the end.”

“I don’t know either, T,” Scott said, “But I’ve got a good feeling about things this time.  I mean, you and I have been coming up with a lot of theories about why the switch was happening, back in the past, and I know we can’t be absolutely sure about any of them, but I’m starting to think that it might have something do with fixing things between the two of us.  And I feel like we’ve done that, don’t you think? You made me remember that we’re a team here in Montreal, and I did the same thing for you back in Michigan. This could be it.”

“Maybe,” Tessa allowed, but she still looked skeptical.  

“I can’t be positive, obviously,” Scott added, grinning up at his partner, “But it’s an instinct thing.  I feel more...solid, somehow. Like I’m not going anywhere. Does that make sense?”

“None of this makes very much sense to me, Scott,” Tessa admitted.  “But if you think so, then maybe…” She let the end of that sentence hang, clearly still wary but trying not to be, and started again.  “I stopped discounting your gut reactions a long time ago—you know that—so I’m not going to say it’s impossible. I don’t know if I’ll believe it yet, but I _hope_ you’re right.”  

“That’s good enough for me,” Scott told her, grinning.

Tessa’s pinched-up expression relaxed reflexively at the sight of his smile, and she ducked down to press her mouth to his.  Scott arched toward her, levering himself up with his arms in an attempt to prolong the kiss, but his progress was cut short when Tessa broke away to yawn.

Her little nose scrunched up as she did, and Scott felt so endeared by the sight that he had to lean in to kiss her again, right on the tip of her nose.  “Alright, kiddo,” he announced, “I think it’s time for bed.”

“Yeah,” Tessa agreed.  “I feel like I could sleep for a year.”

Scott rolled over to his side of the bed, allowing his partner time to turn off her reading light and sink down under the covers before he turned toward her with open arms to invite her back in.  They didn’t always sleep curled up together—in fact, during the summer months Tess had expressly forbidden it because _we would get SO sweaty, Scott_ —but some nights, when the gravity between them felt particularly strong, it settled them like nothing else could.  They been doing it for as long as Scott could remember, innocently as children and then guiltily and secretly as teeangers and then more deliberately again as adults, once they’d managed to work through all the shit that their teen years had stirred up.  It was a tradition, now, embedded in them just as indelibly as any of their keywords on the ice, and it was also one of Scott’s favorite things in the world.

Tessa slid easily into Scott’s arms, and Scott closed his eyes as he felt the familiar weight of her head settling against his chest.  “I wonder what we’re doing right now,” Tessa mused sleepily. “Back in Michigan, I mean.”

“Going to bed, I hope,” Scott replied.  “It’s late.”

“It is,” Tessa laughed.  She wriggled closer to him until their fronts were pressed together from shoulder to knee and hooked her arms around his neck to bind them together as tightly as she could.  “I hope we’re doing alright.”

“Me too,” Scott agreed.  Even through the fatigue settling into his bones, he could feel a sharp affection rise in him in response to Tessa’s concern.  He leaned down to kiss crown of her head and then lingered there just to breathe her in, her hair tickling against his nose as he inhaled.  She smelled like a mix of her shampoo, their laundry detergent, and his body wash, the way she always did.  "Goodnight, T," he said.

"Goodnight, Scott," she replied.

The transition into sleep was so natural that he didn’t remember it in the morning.

\--

Scott recalled thinking that he was going to rest his eyes for _just a minute_ about an hour into _Moulin Rouge!_ , and the next thing he knew he was coming to with dirt and pine needles grinding into his palms and the sound of rushing water all around him.  He could feel indents in his cheek from the knit pattern of Tessa’s sweater, the old cream-colored one that her mom had given her for her fifteenth birthday.  The side of Tessa’s head lolled against the top of his, heavy and warm.

Suddenly, everything snapped back into focus.

“Tess!” he shouted, jolting her as he shot upright.  Tessa flinched next to him, alarmed, and when her eyes snapped open and met his, Scott grabbed her and tugged her into him and squeezed until his ribs creaked under the strain.  “Oh my god, Tess, it’s _you_ !  I can’t believe it’s _you!”_  

“Scott?” Tessa asked tentatively, her voice coming out muffled from where her face was getting mashed into his shoulder, and Scott felt so relieved that he could just about kiss her.

“Yeah, kiddo, it’s me,” he assured her.

Tessa made a noise that sounds somewhere between a laugh and a sigh, and then she wrested herself free to get a good look at him, her wide eyes sweeping over his face.  “I missed you,” she said, simply.

“I missed you too,” Scott admitted, and then he hauled Tess in for another bone-crushing hug so she wouldn’t have to see how stupidly happy his face looked right now.  He really _had_ missed her, he realized.  He’d liked spending time with the older version of Tessa in Montreal, but she wasn’t the partner that he knew like the back of his hand, the partner he’d spent the past eight years growing up next to, the partner he’d…

And for some reason, it was that line of thought that made Scott realize that this version of Tessa was _also_ the partner he’d made out with on a couch while drunk on Friday, despite the fact that he definitely had a girlfriend who was definitely _not_ Tessa, and that this was a problem that he probably should’ve been figuring out during the two days he’d been away.  But he _hadn’t_ figured it out, really; If anything, knowing about his relationship with Tessa in the future made the whole thing worse because now he didn’t know if he should feel guiltier for making out with T while he was dating Emily or for dating Emily at all.

“Hey, T,” he said, trying to summon up some courage.  “About what happened on Friday…”

“Oh, that,” Tessa said, sounding far too flippant.  “It’s okay, Scott. We’re good.”

Scott pulled back from Tessa to try and get a good look at her face, hoping that it would give him some clue that he was missing, because she actually sounded like she was being honest but that was clearly too good to be true.  Strangely, though, her face was relaxed; she was even _smiling_ at him.  “Really?” he asked, still skeptical.  

“Really,” Tessa replied.  “I already talked about it with you—the other you, that is—and we worked through it.  I know you’re dating Emily right now so we probably shouldn’t have done what we did, but it’s not a huge deal; we were both kind of in the wrong mindset, and we can just...not do it again.  We’re okay, I promise.”

“Huh,” Scott said, frowning.  The thought of Scott-from-the-future having successfully navigated this situation _for him_ rubbed him the wrong way, although he couldn’t put his finger on why _._  He’d just been an older version of himself, after all, so it wasn’t like some stranger had been messing with his business, but thinking about it still made something ugly twist up in his guts.  “Well, if you’re sure, T,” he hedged.

“I’m sure,” Tessa said.

Her smile was wide and bright, and Scott knew that he should’ve been relieved but Tessa’s carefree attitude was only intensifying the churning feeling in his stomach.  He tried to shake the sensation, well aware that he should probably be focusing more on the fact that he was back where he belonged and with the version of Tessa that he’d spent the past two days missing like a phantom limb, but he couldn’t quite manage to do it.  

The unease stayed with him on their walk back to the truck, as Tessa described how that they’d fallen asleep while watching the sunset.  It stayed with him as he started the engine and she leaned casually forward to mess with the radio, something she usually left to him. And it stayed with him as they drove back to the house and Tessa alternated between giving him directions and telling him story after story about what she and _The Other Scott_ had been doing for the past two days.  

The worst part was that Tessa was either not picking up on his mood or just flat-out ignoring it, and he didn’t know which option he liked less.  Between monologues about how _great_ The Other Scott had been and how much she’d enjoyed hanging out with him, Tess asked him questions about how he’d liked Montreal and what future-Tessa was like and what he’d been up to while he was away.  And when he responded with curt non-answers (“it’s fine”, “still you”, and “not much”, respectively), she just blazed on ahead like this was just business as usual.

By the time they pulled into the driveway, he was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles were turning white and his head felt like it was about to explode.  If he had to hear one more word about how fucking _spectacular_ The Other Scott was, he was going to lose his goddamn mind.  He scowled as he put the car in park, seriously considering whether or not it counted as murder if the person he strangled to death was a different version of himself.  

This preoccupation was probably why he missed the moment when Tessa’s whole demeanor suddenly flipped on a dime.  One second Scott was staring at the steering wheel while quietly planning a homicide and the next he was getting psychological whiplash from the wariness that was suddenly written all over his partner’s face.  

“What?” he asked, frowning.  

“I don’t know,” Tessa replied, frowning right back.  “You tell me.”

Scott rolled his eyes and killed the engine, and the overhead lights dimmed and then cut out.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Yeah you do,” Tessa insisted, and Scott didn’t even need to see her to know exactly how she was looking at him right at this moment, the way she _always_ looked at him when she found another reason to think that he was a massive disappointment.  “You’re being really weird, Scott.”

“I’m not being weird,” Scott snapped, feeling his temper spike.  “I’m being _normal_.  I’m being exactly the way I normally am.”  

“Then why are you shouting?” Tessa asked.  

“I’m _not!”_ Scott shouted.  “I’m _not shouting!”_  

He could feel the weight of Tessa’s eyes on him in the silence that followed like it was a physical thing, and it was only then that he realized that, yep, he’d _definitely_ raised his voice.  For a moment, he flashed back to his fight with Tessa’s older self that afternoon, to the absolutely stricken look on her face when he’d yelled at her.   _You do_ not _get to talk to me that way, Scott Moir,_ she’d said, like it was a statement of fact, like she expected _better_ of him.  But he _had_ talked to her that way—twice in one day, now.  He couldn’t help but feel a little bad, actually, like he was letting her down somehow.  

“Scott…” Tessa said, interrupting his thoughts, and her voice was doing that wary, walking-on-eggshells thing where she dragged out the “o” in his name to twice its normal length, like he was toddler who she was trying to convince to go down for his nap.  It made him want to smash his own head into the steering wheel with frustration.

Aaaand would you look at that?  The guilt was gone.

“Just leave it, Tessa,” he grumbled coldly.

Normally, this was the point at which Tess would sigh and her face would get all pinched-up and she would say “okay” and give him the cold shoulder for a few hours until she inevitably let it go.  But something in her must have changed in the past two days, something possibly important, because she didn’t do that now. Instead, she crossed her arms over her chest and squared her jaw like she was preparing for battle.

“No,” she told him, sounding more than a little bit pissed off.  “You haven’t even been back for an hour and you’re already...you’re already _mad_ at me.”  Her voice got quiet on that last bit, and it might have been enough to make Scott feel guilty again if she hadn’t immediately followed it up with a very accusatory “Why are you being like this, Scott?”  Because of-freaking- _course_ she did.

“I don’t know,” Scott retorted, feeling rightfully irritated, “Why don’t you ask _The Other Scott_ , huh?  Maybe _he’ll_ be able to help you out?”

And _what the hell_?  Where had _that_ come from?  Scott snapped his jaw shut to prevent himself from saying anything else stupid, and he and Tessa stared at each other in shock for a moment, silent, as both of them slowly processed what had just come out of his mouth.

“Oh my god,” Tessa said, finally.  “You’re _jealous._ ”  She paused, and the way that she was very obviously trying and failing to choke down a laugh made Scott flush all the way down to his neck.  “You’re jealous of _yourself_.  That’s so...”

“I’m not jealous,” Scott replied furiously, cutting her off.  “I’m not. I’m...I’m pissed off, Tessa, because you _obviously_ like him more than me and that is _messed up_.”

“Scott,” Tessa sighed, pityingly, “I _don’t_ like him more than you.”  She said it like she was doing him some kind of a favor, like lying to him was the greatest fucking gift she could ever give him, and he absolutely _hated it._

“Um yeah, Tessa, you obviously do,” Scott snapped, “Because you wouldn’t _shut up_ about ‘The Other Scott’ for the whole drive home.  You’ve obviously got a fucking huge-ass crush on him and that is so stupid and and _creepy_ of you because he’s like twice your age!  He probably thinks you’re just a kid and you’re frickin’ hanging all over him and mooning over him and I’m pretty sure that there’s something wrong with you because that is _messed up_.”

Tessa sucked in a sharp breath, taking Scott’s words about as well as punch to the gut, and Scott had just enough time to regret them before Tessa was firing back at him like she’d been waiting to do it for _years_ .  “God, Scott, you’re such an _asshole_!” she shouted.

“Oh _I’m_ the asshole?” Scott couldn’t help but interject, and he knew he was only antagonizing her but he couldn’t help it.  “ _I’m_ the asshole, Tessa, when _you’re_ the one who’s…”

“ _Shut up,_ ” Tessa hissed, shouting right over him to cut him off.  “You are! You’re being a massive _asshole_ to me right now, Scott!  You’re being ridiculous and jealous and _stupid_!  And for the record, I _didn’t_ have a ‘huge-ass crush’ on The Other Scott, but I _did_ like him, maybe even more than I like _you_ right now.  And do you know why?  Do you know _why_ I liked him, Scott?  Because he actually listened to me when I talked and he wasn’t embarrassed to hang out with me and he didn’t freaking _blow up at me_ over stupid shit!  I just liked him because he was nice to me.  That’s all he had to do to be better than you.  So you can just _shut up._ ”  

There was a long, horrible moment after she stopped talking where he wondered if she was mean enough to say all that just to hurt him, but then he saw the tears welling up in her eyes and the fragile, halfway-horrified look on her face, and then there was an even longer, more horrible moment where he realized that she actually _meant it_.  Scott would’ve felt better if she’d just punched him in the face.  

“Jesus, T,” he said quietly, and he didn’t know what he planned to say after that but he didn’t get the chance because Tessa was suddenly throwing herself out of the passenger side of the truck and actually _running_ to get away from him and into the house as fast as possible.  

Scott stayed put for a long time after that, letting the silence and the dark creep up around him and the chill from the open passenger door settle into his bones.  Then he slumped back against the headrest, rallied, and got prepared himself to go inside and confront the problem head-on. He’d apologize, she’d apologize, and then everything would be fine, just like always, because that’s always how it went no matter what.

 

Five minutes later, he found himself leaning his forehead against Tessa’s locked bedroom door.  “C’mon, Tutu,” he wheedled, trying to keep his voice down so that Meryl and Charlie wouldn’t hear.  “I _said_ I’m sorry.  Can you please open the door?”

He could hear it as Tessa sniffled on the other side, a sure sign that she was crying, and Scott swallowed painfully around the lump that was forming in his throat.  “No,” she said. Her voice was quiet and a little shaky, but Scott could hear the resolve in it. His heart sank.

“Can we talk about this, T?” he asked.  “I don’t want to go to sleep with you still mad at me.”

There was a brief stillness on the other side of the door, and then Scott heard Tessa’s head thunk against the cheap pressboard.  “That sounds like _your_ problem,” she said finally, with an unnecessarily smug satisfaction.  But she was still Tessa, still the girl who’d been holding his hand every day since she was seven years old, so she took a deep breath and added a little “Goodnight, Scott” before she slipped away.

It felt like those two words drained all the energy out of his body, leaving him leaning heavily against the door that his partner wouldn’t open for him.  He pressed his right hand flat against the wood, like he could reach through it if he tried hard enough. “Goodnight, T,” he said.

Then he went into the living room, flopped down on the uncomfortable futon, and tried to figure out how this had all become screwed up so quickly. _I_ _wish I could ask Tess,_ he thought to himself, as he finally started to nod off. _Either one._

Sleep came upon him suddenly and inexplicably, like being hit by a moving bus.


	12. Change of Scenery, Change Of Scene

Scott opened his eyes that morning and was startled to find himself in exactly the same position he’d fallen asleep: with Tessa’s head tucked under his chin, her arms and legs wrapped around him like an octopus, and her body a comforting weight against his chest.  

He was home.  It was all over.  And it felt absolutely fucking _perfect._

Then Scott sucked in a deep, contented breath and promptly inhaled some of Tessa’s hair.  He spluttered and tried to cough as delicately as he could, straining his neck to avoid being too loud right next to her ear, and regained his bearings.  

Once he’d managed to sort _that_ out, though, he was right back to feeling great and happy and zen.  It was a beautiful Thursday morning, the sun was out, the day looked beautiful, and there was just a single three-hour photo shoot separating Scott from a long weekend of kicking back and relaxing with his best friend in the entire world.  The very same best friend in the entire world had _just agreed to marry him_.  

Oh yeah, this was going to be awesome.

He took one more moment to enjoy the feeling of being cocooned in their bed before he gently disentangled himself from Tessa, trying not to wake her, and slipped out to get ready for his morning run.  He debated waking T up to join him for a half-second or so—they did that sometimes, tracing their normal loop together side by side while Tessa’s headphones blared out an abrasive, Eminem-heavy playlist at such high volume that Scott could hear it even over his own music and breathing—but then he turned his head toward the clock, read the numbers _6:05_ , and decided against it.  

Tessa Virtue could be a saint when she wanted to be, Scott mused as he laced up his gym shoes, but only after either 9 AM or her second cup of coffee.  And since Tessa was a light sleeper who was probably already half awake just from him getting up next to her, she wouldn’t be making it over the threshold to nine this morning.  

With that in mind, Scott started up the coffee maker, watched it fill while he ate breakfast, and hoped for the best.  

Then he did his dishes, grabbed his phone and wallet and house keys, and headed out the door.  Once he got to the sidewalk, he turned left without thinking, preparing to take the route that hooked south and west, tracing a path through the center of the city.  It was a beautiful run at this time of day, and Scott probably would have chosen it simply because he loved watching the city wake up around him, but today the loop also had the distinct advantage of being a run that he could adjust to make it very, very long.  

This served two purposes.  The first was simple: Scott felt like his body was just about exploding with energy, and he needed to productively use some of that up instead of impatiently bouncing around the apartment with nothing to do until Tessa woke up.  The second reason, though, was that he needed some time to reflect.

And reflect he did, functioning on autopilot as he navigated the first few crosswalks that would eventually join him up with the familiar trailhead at the edge of Jeanne-Mance park.

Last night, the moment when Tessa had agreed to marry him had felt like the most incredibly perfect, beautiful thing that would ever happen to him—and it still was!  But in the light of day, Scott almost couldn’t believe it. It didn’t have anything to do with Tess, really; saying he felt suspicious because he wasn’t sure of Tessa’s feelings was both wrong and also kind of an insult to her, considering how deliberate she was these days about making sure Scott knew that she loved him.  So that wasn’t it; he was clear on Tessa’s feelings, and he trusted that she wanted to marry him.

But it _was_ an uncertainty of a different sort, some almost subconscious instinct lingering at the back of his brain that was saying _you don’t deserve something this good._  

Having arrived in the park, Scott slowed to a walk so that he could put on his workout playlist, surprised that he’d been too distracted to think of it earlier.  He couldn’t help but smile when _Guilty Conscience_ started to play, thinking to himself that Tessa might be starting to rub off on him a little too much.  He took a right onto the trail and let the song play anyway, his head bobbing a little bit to the beat as Eminem and Dr. Dre bickered over his headphones.

After he got back up to pace, though, Scott felt it as his thoughts fell back into their earlier rhythm as well, which was no big surprise.  Feeling like he hadn’t done enough to deserve what he was given was something Scott struggled with when it came to Tess—something he’d _always_ struggled with when it came to Tess.  No matter how clearly and explicitly and consistently they worked through it, there was always some small part of him that expected her to wake up one morning and decide that _this_ was the day when she reached her breaking point and decided to be rid of him at last.  Because she was Tessa Virtue, cool-headed and measured and driven and _excellent_ at whatever she set her mind to _,_ and he was Scott Moir, frustratingly mercurial and about as subtle as a bull in a china shop.   _And_ because it was only fair that she would eventually get the chance to reciprocate, given that he’d been the one to leave _her_ in the past, not just once but countless times.

He’d left her at the end of every hard training week during their teen years when she’d said that she’d needed him and begged him to stay and he’d just wanted to go home and decompress.  

He’d left her before her first surgery and then for the whole length of her recovery afterward.  

And he’d left her after every one of those nights in the years before Sochi in a thousand different hotel beds and empty locker rooms when he’d peeled his skin off of hers and walked away and left her alone to sort through how they were destroying each other slowly, kiss by kiss, touch by touch.

Surely, after all of that, it was her turn to flip the script.  

He was lucky Tessa wasn’t here to pick up on this train of thought, he realized, or she’d really give him an earful.   _You always came back_ , she would remind him, her fingers squeezing his hand so hard that he could feel his bones ache under the strain.   _And I’ll always come back to you._

So yeah, Scott knew that the feeling had almost nothing to do with Tess and _everything_ to do with guilt that he was still struggling to fight his way through; years of self-reflection and therapy had finally helped him make heads and tails of that.  He’d even thought that he was completely _over it_ recently, but he should’ve guessed that seeing that engagement ring on Tessa’s finger would be the thing to bring it all back to the surface, since it was the one thing left that he still felt guilty about.  

The memory of how Tessa had initially come into possession of the ring was an unpleasant one.  It had been while they were still in Sochi, during those few strange, uncomfortable days between the end of their event and closing ceremonies.  Things had crashed and burned with Cass, the reality of their silver medals had begun to settle in, and Scott had kept having flashbacks to their pre-Olympics talk in Canton, when Tessa had sat him down with tears in her eyes and said _I want to be done, Scott_ in the most desperate, forlorn voice he’d ever heard, like she was divorcing him instead of deciding not to compete with him again.  He’d felt lost and terrified, like his whole world had been coming crashing down on him all at once.

So he’d gotten day-drunk and gone out and bought an engagement ring.  He’d done it out of desperation and fear, a half-assed attempt to keep the one person in his life that he knew he couldn’t live without.  He’d done it despite the fact that he’d barely known what went on in Tessa’s head anymore, despite the fact that they hadn’t so much as kissed since Worlds the year before, and despite the fact that he and Tessa had been more distant than they’d been since after her first surgery in 2009.  And then, like the terrified idiot that he was, he’d tried to propose.

He really shouldn’t have been surprised when she’d said no.  But, somehow, he _had_ been surprised; he’d watched in shock as she’d sucked in a quick breath, sounding like she’d just been slapped, and burst into tears.  

“No, Scott,” she’d said, in a painfully disappointed voice that still sometimes haunted him.  “You shouldn’t have asked me that. It’s not fair.”

And it _hadn’t_ been fair; he knew that now.  But at that point, he figured that if he was already on the highway to hell, then he might as well speed, too.  So he’d asked her to _keep the ring_ , “in case you change your mind, the offer will still stand,” like an absolute asshole.  

Tessa had cried harder, Scott had made a rapid exit before she’d had the chance to hurl something at him like he deserved, and that had been the end of it until four years later, about two weeks after Pyongchang.  

He’d been coming home from the bar after a hockey game with friends, grinning and buzzed and trying to be quiet as he crept through Tessa’s apartment, and as he’d peeled his jacket off he’d spotted the familiar box on the counter next to a bowl of fruit, open, the ring staring right at him from across the room.  If it had been anyone other than Tessa, he would’ve said that it was accidental—that she hadn’t intended to leave it out, that it meant nothing—but it _was_ Tessa, and he knew her, and he knew exactly what this meant.

He’d practically torn his shoes off in his rush to get to the bedroom, the smile on his face almost painfully wide.  When he opened the door, Tess was sitting there with her glasses sliding down her nose and her bedside lamp on, fully absorbed in her book.  

“Tess,” he’d said, feeling like the breath had been just about punched out of him.  “I…are you...”

Tessa’s mouth had quirked up ever so slightly at the corners, an almost imperceptible motion.  “I just wanted you to know that I’m thinking about it,” she’d responded evenly, knowing exactly what he was getting at.  “Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” Scott had replied.  His heart had been pounding, totally beating out of his chest.  “Yeah, T, it’s _more_ than okay, it’s…” he’d trailed off, not knowing how on earth he planned on finishing that sentence in a meaningful way while completely blindsided by emotion and still riding a three-beer buzz.  

“Good,” Tessa had said, her grin taking on an almost Cheshire-cat-like smugness.  And then, like it was just any other night, she’d turned back the covers on the opposite side of the bed, closed her book, and said, “So, how was the game?”  

 _Classic Tess,_ he thought to himself with satisfaction, grinning and feeling better than he had all morning.  And then he took a right turn, crossed the street, and started along the back half of the loop, abandoning the park in favor of crossing under the 138 for a change of scenery on the route back.  It was time to go home.

Scott took the second half of the run at a much brisker pace, feeling his mind go comfortably blank as he lost himself to the motion and the music blaring out of his headphones.  The distance seemed to fly by, and a few people even turned to look at him as he passed them on the street, following him with their eyes and giving him the sort of shocked-and-awed stares that he usually didn’t get unless T was there alongside of him.  By the time he got back to his own neighborhood, sweat had adhered the back of his t-shirt to his skin and he could feel his breathing getting high and sharp in his chest. He slowed to a jog and then to a walk as he reached his block, dropping his pace just in time to admire the brightly-colored display of the flower shop that was on the main level of the building a few houses down.  

It was a nice little place, and Tessa stopped there every once and a while to buy them something to brighten up their kitchen.  Now it seemed like they were doing some sort of spring-is-here event, featuring all of the usual suspects: daisies, some white and some with their petals dyed blue or violet or yellow, which Tessa said was _kind of tacky, Scott_ , although she still bought them sometimes because she knew he secretly liked them; red, yellow, and white roses, some grouped into bouquets with little sprigs of baby’s breath mixed in; and big-headed lilies and daffodils and sunflowers.  And right by the door, already pre-wrapped in a little green-papered bouquet like they were just waiting for him, was a beautiful arrangement of bright red tulips, Tessa’s favorite.

So Scott took a five-minute detour to buy them, because it was an easy thing that he knew would make Tessa happy, which would make _him_ happy in return.  

He slowly made his way up the stairs to their apartment afterward, feeling the ache that was already settling into his quads and cradling the bouquet under his arm, and thought about the terrific weekend he had ahead of him.

The first thing Scott saw as he stumbled through the front door was Tessa, curled up on their couch in tears.

His mood turned on a dime.  “Oh my god,” Scott shouted, all but flinging the flowers aside in his panic to get to his partner faster, “Tess, hey, what’s going on?  Are you okay?”

Tessa’s head jerked up at the sound of his voice, her eyes locked on Scott’s face, and immediately he just _knew._  Scott took a minute to rein himself in as he felt his stomach drop down to his toes, fighting to keep the disappointment off his face.  And then he pasted on the gentlest expression he could manage and walked toward his distressed partner, his steps slow and deliberate.

“Hey there, T,” he said softly.  

He extended a hand toward her, moving to place it on her shoulder, but before he could even get there Tessa was off the couch and throwing herself into him, her arms latching around his neck and squeezing tight.  

“Whoa,” Scott breathed, and his hands came up to rub her back, halfway on autopilot.  “It’s okay, Tess. It’s okay.”

This only made Tessa cry harder, so Scott hugged her close and kept smoothing his hands in circles over her back, rocking the two of them slowly back and forth on their feet as he did.  

“Sorry,” Tessa said a minute later, even as her head dropping heavily into the crook of his shoulder and her hands migrated from his neck to his back, where they balled up fistfuls of his sweat-damp shirt and latched on.  “This is horrible. I mean, I’m so, _so_ happy to see you, Scott, but…”

“I know,” Scott agreed.  He leaned into Tessa’s weight slightly, just enough to press his cheek to her hair, and his mind suddenly jumped to the engagement ring on her finger and the line of bruises he’d sucked into the skin between her collarbone and her right breast, both of which he’d been pretty jazzed about until a minute ago.  Now, he didn’t know which of the two he was looking forward to explaining less. “Believe me, T,” he continued, more emphatically this time, “I _know._ ”  

Tessa pulled back to look at him after that, and the expression on her face—eyebrows raised, head cocked slightly to the side, mouth set in a studious little line—was such a hallmark Tessa Virtue look at _any_ age that Scott couldn’t help but chuckle despite the situation.  

“What?” Tess asked him, and the harsh pressed-in line of her lips started to give way to a reflexive smile.  She sniffed a little, brushing at her red-rimmed eyes with the back of one hand. “What is it?”

Scott just shook his head, and he felt his nerves settle.  “It’s nothing,” he replied. He stepped back to grip his partner’s shoulders and give them a brief squeeze.  “C’mon,” he said, “I’ll make you breakfast.”

 

 

Half an hour later, Scott found himself up to his elbows in dish water while Tessa stared strangely at him from where she was perched behind the counter on the opposite side of the kitchen, finishing her second cup of coffee.  Her expression was an odd mix of a few things: thoughtful, he could tell by the pucker between in her eyebrows, but the down-twisted set of her mouth and the way her arms were crossed protectively over her chest screamed _mad and trying to hide it._  Which was strange, considering that Scott couldn’t think of anything he’d done between finishing his eggs and walking two feet to the kitchen sink that would have upset her.  

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.  He placed the pan he’d been washing down on the drying rack and turned to look her in the eyes, giving her his full attention.  “You’re looking a little...mad...there.”

Tessa sighed, flopping her head dramatically onto her arm against the countertop.  “Ugh, I know,” she admitted. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. Well, not _this_ you, I guess.  I’m angry at other-you right now and you look like him and he’s not here right now, so it’s kind of hard to seperate.”  

Scott raised his hands placatingly, gesturing the he understood.  “Hey, I get it," he said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Tessa shrugged, biting at her lip.  Her fingers fidgeted reflexively with her engagement ring, and Scott held his breath as he waited to see if she’d notice what she was doing, realizing that it was a conversation that they were obviously going to have to have but just _not at this exact moment, please, dear god, I’m not ready._  “Yeah, I guess I do,” Tessa admitted after a while, her fingers moving on from her ring as she wrapped her hands back around her coffee mug, and Scott barely controlled his sigh of relief.  

“So,” Scott probed, “What happened?”

“We got into a fight last night,” Tessa said.  She was trying to keep things light, Scott could tell, but the way her shoulders hunched together as she spoke gave her away.  “My Scott and I, that is. He was jealous because I liked hanging out with you, which was stupid, and he said some mean things and then _I_ said some things back and we both went to sleep before we got to talk about it.”

Scott could feel his jaw clench as he took in the look of fatigue and stress on his partner’s face.  “What kind of things did he say?” he asked, fighting to sound neutral.

“You know, just some not-so-nice stuff,” Tessa replied.  “None of it was too bad, but you were _yelling,_ and that made me upset more than anything.  You said that I liked older-you more than regular-you, and you were pretty mad about it. And then you accused me of having a crush on older-you, which isn’t true by the way, and you said that it was creepy and messed up for me to do it."

“I’m sorry,” Scott said, his voice going a bit hoarse.  He was gripping the counter tightly, trying to keep a lid on how angry he was getting at the thought of him hurling insults at his partner that way.  “You didn’t deserve that. I hope you know that, T.”

Tessa nodded, and her eyes were getting a little misty but her expression was resolute.  “I know,” she told him. “But I wasn’t even really mad about _what_ you said, honestly.  I was mostly just upset that you wouldn’t tell me what was bothering you and that you got so angry right away.  It wasn’t fair.”

“It _wasn’t_ fair, you’re right,” Scott agreed.  He walked around the counter toward his partner as he spoke, taking her hands in his.  “Are you okay?”

Tessa swallowed hard and shook her head, her chin trembling slightly.   _“No_ ,” she admitted, and the way her voice cracked absolutely shredded Scott’s heart.  “I’m _not_ okay,” Tessa replied.  “How come it’s so easy to talk about this stuff with _this_ you when it’s so hard with _my_ Scott?  How come we both get so worked up and misunderstand each other and make things worse instead of better?  Why _is_ that?”

Scott blew out a long, tired breath and stepped into Tessa’s space, giving her a bracing hug before backing off again.  “The short answer is that we’ve had a lot more years to work at it by the time we get here,” Scott replied, spreading his arms wide to gesture at the apartment around him.

“And what’s the _long_ answer, then?”

“God, where can I even start?” Scott laughed.  “Well, we both grew up a lot, to begin with. Getting out of puberty helped, for sure.  So did relationship counselling, which we’ve had a _lot_ of by now.  And...well, we’ve also just been through a lot of shit together—some really _hard_ shit—and somewhere along the line we realized that we needed to be able to be honest with each other if we were going to get through it, just in terms of survival.  So we tried to stop shielding one another so much and started really trying to reverse habits on that front, to be a little more open about what was bothering us. And we still aren’t completely there, you know?  We’re a lot better, a lot more honest, but we still have to work at it every day. Sometimes I still tick you the hell off, and sometimes you say or do something that gets under my skin. But we’ve gotten a lot better at talking through it instead of just letting it sit.  You’ll get there; it’ll just take some time.”

“Ugh,” Tessa grumbled, leaning forward to press her forehead to Scott’s chest in exasperation.  “I don’t want it to take some time. I want to get through it _now.”_

Scott laughed and ducked down to drop a fond kiss to the top of Tessa’s head.  “Sorry, kiddo,” he apologized.

“I don’t like your more than my Scott, to be clear,” Tessa said after a while, her voice coming up muffled and soft from where she was still pressed into the front of his t-shirt.  “I mean, don’t get me wrong, you are _really nice_ .  And you’re definitely nicer to me than my Scott, especially recently.  But my Scott was wrong about me liking you more than him. My Scott can be...difficult, sometimes, but he’s still my partner.  He’s the partner that I _earned._  And, I mean, I’m also kind of the Tessa that _he_ earned.  I’m sure that future-me is awesome, but he doesn’t get to have her yet.   _I’m_ his partner.  I think he probably gets that, right, underneath everything?  He has to get that.”

“Yeah, T,” Scott replied.  There was a clear possessiveness in her voice, sharp and palpable, and it was unreasonably endearing.  “I think he does.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi. Hello. 
> 
> So I know it’s been an unforgivably long time, but I’m finally back with another update! Work and medical school applications have been slowly killing me, but everything has finally started to taper off so I should be back to regular updates after this (i.e. at least once a week). 
> 
> For those of you who have stuck with me this far: thank you!! I’ve just gone through my outlines, and I think we have approximately 3 chapters of the story left to go after this, plus (maybe, if anyone would be interested) some epilogues and/or cuts afterward. I hope you're all doing well! :)


	13. Growing Pains

Sometime during the night, an unseasonable heat wave rolled in.  Scott realized this before he realized anything else from the rivulets of sweat that were collected along the midline of his back and the way he could feel the humidity as a physical weight in the air he breathed.  The sun was up but still low in the sky, and it cast long shadows across the room as it filtered in from the nearby window.

Today was going to be another bear of a day, given his track record this week.  The last time he’d done something stupid when it came to Tessa, he’d woken up in Montreal in 2019.  Now that he’d almost wrecked their relationship in the future and definitely wrecked it at least temporarily in the present, going back to Montreal seemed too kind. He had no idea where he’d find himself today.  

 _Bedridden in my late eighties, probably,_ Scott thought sullenly to himself, although he didn’t feel achy enough or uncomfortable enough to merit it. Honestly, though, it would kind of serve him right.

Scott groaned, flipping over onto his side and pressing his face into the crease of the world’s worst futon to block the light, keeping his eyes squeezed shut.  The fabric smelled like the furniture of a summer cabin always did: strongly of pine and lake water and faintly of sunscreen and mildew.

Scott’s head snapped up suddenly, his brain finally connecting the dots.  The futon. The cabin. He was somehow, remarkably, still in Michigan. Which meant...

 _“Shit,”_ he whispered to himself, quietly but with feeling.   _Tess._  

He’d really fucked things up last night.  He shouldn’t have let himself get so worked up, especially first thing after getting back to his own time and getting to actually see his best friend for the first time in two days.  He’d known that his head wasn’t in the right place even while the fight had been happening, but he’d still gone and made an ass of himself anyhow.

 _No wonder Tess liked the other me better_ , he thought glumly.   _I bet he yelled at her a lot less._

He had to apologize again, he realized—sincerely this time.  Not just because he needed T to forgive him, but also because he genuinely meant it, now that he’d had the night to sleep on it, and because he was glad to have the chance to actually smooth things over for himself, in his own time and with his own partner.

Scott propped himself up onto one elbow and turned around, trying to get a good look at Tessa’s bedroom door.  It was closed, which meant that she was either up before him or still sleeping; considering that Scott could count the times Tessa had woken up earlier than him on one hand, he knew which of the two options was the safer bet.

A bit further away, Scott could hear the telltale rustling of Meryl and Charlie getting up and preparing for the day.  Usually Scott really liked them—or, okay, if he was being honest then he really liked Charlie and was just kind of neutral on Meryl—but today he couldn’t help but feel a prickling of resentment toward them.  Meryl would probably be up soon to eat her dumb healthy breakfast, Charlie would go deep-condition his dumb hair during his dumb thirty-minute-long shower, and then they’d both be all up in his business before he had a chance to set things straight with Tessa and he and T would be sullen and weird with each other all day.  

 _I could always try to wake her up to talk to her now,_ Scott thought to himself.  And then he pictured Tessa’s sour morning face, realized how ridiculously bad of an idea that was, and immediately scrapped it.  If not talking to T was a bad idea, then _waking her up_ to talk to her was a worse one.  Despite his misstep yesterday, he wasn’t looking to get reamed out again before breakfast, thank you very much.  

The sound of a door knob turning focused Scott’s attention back on the hallway behind him, and he snapped his head back toward Tessa’s room just in time to see her throw the door open and stride out into the hall, her gaze wild and her jaw clenched.  She scanned the living room purposefully, her eyes skimming over the furniture, looking for something.

Then her eyes clamped onto Scott, and he felt his heart leap right up into his throat.  

“T?” Scott asked, the tremor in his voice completely involuntary.  “T, are you okay?”

Tessa stiffened up for a moment, her spine straightening and her features pinching up, and then she walked toward him and leaned in until her face was only inches away from his, close enough that it would have been uncomfortable if she were anyone else.  “Scott,” she whispered, “How old are you?”

The realization hit Scott like ton of bricks.  “Eighteen,” he replied, his voice so soft that he was barely doing more than just mouthing the words.  

“And how old am I?” Tessa persisted.  

“You’re sixteen,” Scott responded.  

Tessa sagged down toward him immediately, her forehead dropping to his.  “I knew it,” she sighed. “God _dammit._ ”

Her breath ghosted across his mouth as she spoke, and her nose slid alongside his, but Scott didn’t pull back.  Instead, he raised a trembling hand and put it to Tessa’s cheek, grounding himself in the sensation. “I’m sorry,” he told her.  

Tessa took a deep breath and then pulled away, and her features slowly smoothed out.  Scott watched, awed, as she put herself back together. “We should go back to the bedroom,” she said after a minute.  “We need to talk.”

Scott nodded, realizing that she was right, and then followed Tessa into her bedroom, closing the door behind him and turning to face her.  

“This is _not_ how I thought I’d be spending my morning,” she told him evenly.  And Scott would’ve almost believed that she was taking this whole ordeal well if he’d just heard her voice alone, but he was also able to see her, and the way she’d started pacing the second the door had clicked shut.

“Yeah,” Scott agreed, “Me either.  After last night, I honestly thought I’d wake up back in the future with you, or maybe someplace worse.”  

Tessa paused mid-step to whirl around and face him.  “What?” she snapped. She looked somewhere between confused and homicidal, an expression that was almost as scary as it had been on Older-Tessa despite her badly-dyed red hair and the pillow lines still creasing up her cheek.  

“Well, that’s what happened last time, right?” Scott replied, feeling a little panicky and a _lot_ guilty.  “I messed something up with Tess and it landed me back to the future or whatever.”

“That’s what my Scott thought, too,” Tessa mused, frowning thoughtfully.  “He thought it might be about teaching a lesson—fixing something between the two of us.  But he also thought that we’d done it, that we’d taught each other enough for this whole process to end.  Scott, what happened last night?”

Scott swallowed thickly, feeling the words stick in his throat.  “I, uh,” he started, and then he took one look at Older Tessa’s patient, expectant look on _his_ Tessa’s face and completely lost his nerve.  “I,” he tried again, and again the words died out.  

“Scott,” Tessa said, “I need you to tell me.  If you and my Scott are right, then we can’t fix this unless you do.”  

“I know,” Scott admitted.  Then he took a deep breath, let it out, and pictured sixteen-year-old T, trapped in the future in Montreal and probably scared half to death.   _You gotta do this for Tess,_ he thought to himself.  “We fought,” he told Tessa, already feeling a little ashamed.  “Well, _I_ yelled, first, and _then_ we fought.”

“What did you fight about?” Tessa asked.

Scott felt his cheeks go red.  “It was stupid,” he said. “Stupid, not important stuff.”  

Tessa tilted her head slightly to the side, like changing the angle might make the answer appear on his forehead or something.  “What kind of stuff?” she questioned.

“Jealousy stuff,” Scott replied.  “Um…”

“What was I jealous _of?_ ” Tessa asked, and Scott just sat there and blinked for a moment, shocked that Tessa would make that leap so quickly.  There was something there, probably, but now probably wasn’t a good time to ask.

“ _I_ was the one who was jealous,” Scott admitted.

“Oh,” Tessa replied.  She looked surprised, and her eyes drifted up and left, like she was trying to remember something.  “What about? I know I wasn’t seeing anyone at this age…”

“Um, yeah, not about that,” Scott answered.  “This is stupid, so just keep that in mind, but I was actually kind of jealous of...me?  Older me, I mean.”

 _“Oh,”_ Tessa repeated, sounding like she’d finally started to catch on.  “I see.”

Scott looked down at his feet, feeling suddenly very interested in the wood grain of the floor.  “Yeah,” he said.

“What, specifically, were you jealous of?” Tessa asked him.  

“I don’t know,” Scott said, although he kind of did.  

Tessa must have sensed the bluff, too, because she stayed quiet and waited for him to continue.

“I mean...just that she liked the older me more than _this_ me, I guess,” Scott conceded,  after a while. “I mean, _I’m_ supposed to be her Scott, right, but she just seemed like she had a really good time with the other-me while I was gone.  She kept talking about all the stuff they did together and all this stuff about him and how great he was.” Scott swallowed and looked away again, and he didn’t know why his eyes were getting misty talking about this but they definitely were.  “It was like...like she didn’t even miss me.”

“Oh Scott,” Tessa sighed.  She sounded tired, but also kind of sad, too.

“I know, I know,” Scott said, trying to be inconspicuous as he blinked back tears.  “Like I said. Stupid.”

“It isn’t stupid,” Tessa corrected, “But it _is_ untrue.”  

Scott rolled his eyes.  “You can’t know that,” he told her, frowning.  “I mean, _you_ definitely wanted your own Scott back, so why shouldn’t my Tess like him more, too?  There’s no way you could know how she feels.”

“Of _course_ I can,” Tessa replied, sounding almost irritated, now.  “And do you know how I know?”

“No,” Scott responded, trying and failing not to sound petulant about it.

“Because I know that, if I had the chance to choose between _my_ Scott and any other version in the world—even one who understood me better and argued with me less and was endlessly kind and sweet to me—I would pick my Scott over any other version, every time.”  

 _“Why?”_ Scott asked, frowning.  “Why would you do that?”

“Probably for the same reasons you’d pick your version Tessa over me, if I asked you,” Tessa replied, sounding utterly calm and unbothered.  

It took almost a full minute of Scott just standing there and staring blankly at her for the shockwaves of that statement to wear off and for the meaning of them to finally sink in.  It was almost unbelievable, that it would be so simple. So easy. “But I’m not even _nice_ to you,” Scott protested, “We had a whole fight about it, literally _yesterday_.”

“I’m not always nice to you, either,” Tessa replied easily, like that made everything alright.  

“That’s not all, though,” Scott persisted, undeterred, and then the words were pouring out of him like a big, stupid waterfall of guilt.  “I don’t listen sometimes—okay, a lot of times. And I don’t like your music and I don’t get your favorite movies and when you dyed your hair I teased you until you actually _cried_.  And I yell at you.  And I’m too embarrassed to tell people that you’re my best friend even though you kind of definitely are.”  

“Believe me, Scott,” Tessa chuckled, “I remember all of that—some of it a bit too clearly, to be honest.  You should know, though, that future-you isn’t perfect, either. You’re impatient and easily distracted, you still don’t like most of my music, and you consistently wake me up before six AM because you have no concept of the word _quiet._  But I still love you and I would never want to trade you for anyone else, even if that someone else is a different version of you.  Even if that person is a _better_ version of you.  Okay?”

“Okay,” Scott replied.  Tessa’s eyes were big and wide and shiny, like maybe she was trying not to cry just as much as he was, and something about that made Scott feel both happy and sad at the same time.  “Thanks, Tess.”

“Yeah,” Tessa responded.  She cleared her throat, looking almost embarrassed, and then refocused.  “So, what exactly did you say to me last night?”

Scott swallowed, the warm fuzzy feeling in his chest leaving just as quickly as it had appeared, and then he launched into a brief summary of last night’s events beginning with their sullen and uncomfortable car ride and ending with their last conversation through the intermediary of Tess’s bedroom door.  

Tessa only interrupted a few times, mainly just to clarify something or ask for more detail, but by the time Scott was done she was rubbing her temples tiredly with her thumbs and looking utterly and completely _fed up._  

“You realize what I’m going to say here, don’t you?” Tessa checked.  “That open communication would have prevented literally all of this and that you weren’t thinking clearly?”

“Yeah,” Scott replied lamely.  “Sorry, T.” He peeked over at her out of the corner of his eye, and noticed that she’d switched to just covering her eyes with one hand.  “Um, are you mad at me?”

“A little, Scott!” Tessa replied, raising her head up to give him a look.  “Jesus, what a mess.” And then, with an expression and tone that in no way fit the sixteen-year-old-body she was currently housed in, Tessa blew out a deep breath and stated “ _God_ I need a drink.”  

The cognitive dissonance proved to be too much for Scott, because he took a long look at her, slowly processed her statement, and then burst into a long, half-hysterical laugh.  

Tessa watched him for a moment, unamused at first, but then as he kept laughing she cracked a smile and rolled her eyes and, finally, laughed a little herself.  “Okay, alright, I get it,” she said, “I’m young, it’s a ridiculous situation, no drinking before nine AM for the sixteen-year-old. You’re still not off the hook for last night, though.  I’m still mad at you and you _still_ have to make it up to me _and_ to your Tessa.”

Scott’s laughter finally died down, and he found himself nodding back at her.  “That’s fair,” he agreed. “So, how can I…”

And then the words died in his mouth because Charlie White was suddenly pounding on the door and shouting in at them.  “Hey, lovebirds! Are you two coming out any time soon? Meryl’s making pancakes and they’re gonna get cold.”

He and Tessa exchanged a look, rolling their eyes in sync.  

“We’ll be right out,” Scott shouted back.  “Give us a minute.”

“One minute or we’re eating without you!” Charlie threatened, sounding incredibly chipper about it.  

The second he was gone, Tessa turned to Scott with a decidedly put-upon look on her face.  “They’re going to be bran pancakes,” Tessa stated flatly. “I I don’t think I can handle bran pancakes on top of this morning, I swear to god.”  

And Scott looked at her, standing there cross-armed and frowning like she was gearing up for battle, and was struck by a feeling so strong that it almost bowled him over.  It wasn’t _love_ , exactly, but it was definitely something love-tangential.  Thankfulness, probably.

“C’mon, T,” he goaded, smiling and bumping her shoulder companionably with his.  “Let’s get out there. It’s just breakfast; how bad can it be?”

“Ugh,” Tessa said, but she reached down and squeezed Scott’s hand with hers before she turned and walked out the door to face their possibly-bran-filled breakfast and their fingers slotting familiarly together for just a second, barely long enough for him to notice.

Scott followed behind her after she let go, grinning like an idiot.  

(And okay, yeah, maybe it _was_ love, actually.  Because she was still Tessa, after all.)

\--

Breakfast could be pretty bad, as it turned out.  Something about Scott and Tessa’s half-day adventure in L’anse the day before had seemingly convinced Meryl and Charlie that they were secretly dating (or, perhaps more accurately, at least secretly fucking around), which meant that the atmosphere felt caught somewhere between a middle school gossip ring and going home with your girlfriend to meet the parents.  

And considering that neither of them had been physically present for yesterday’s vacation outside of Scott’s recollection of Tessa’s stories from last night, most of which he’d been too busy sulking to remember, they were in sort of a bad spot to be grilled about the situation.  

“So,” Meryl drawled, whirling around from the stove to face them with a spatula in hand, “How was _town_ yesterday?”

“Town was good,” Tessa replied.  And her acting ability was better at twenty-nine than it it was at sixteen, without a doubt, but that was a very low bar.  

“What did you do?” Charlie asked.  He was grinning at them widely over his cup of coffee, looking a little too smug.  

“Stuff,” Scott replied vaguely.  

Tessa elbowed him under the table, going right for the ribs.  

“Ow—I mean _oh._  Not much, I guess. Just bummed around.”  Scott tried and failed to be subtle as he rubbed the smarting spot where Tessa’s pointy elbow had jabbed into his side.   _I think that might bruise,_ he thought to himself with a frown.

“Huh,” Charlie said.  “Well, the two of you sure did make a long day of _not much_.  We went to bed before you got in last night.”

“Okay, _dad_ ,” Scott snapped, rolling his eyes and feeling a little more like himself than he had in this conversation so far.  “What, was I out passed curfew or something?”

Charlie laughed, rolling his eyes right back.  “Fine,” he said, “ _Be_ that way; keep your little secrets.  See if I care.”

“Great,” Scott replied, “We will.”  

And then Meryl turned around again, this time with a plate of strangely lumpy-looking pancakes in her hands.  “Okay, here we go,” she announced. “Done!”

And yeah, thank _god,_ they were going to be saved by the pancakes.  Scott speared a few with a fork and plopping them onto his plate, doused them in maple syrup, and cut himself a massive bite.  

But the second he started to chew, he knew that something was... _not right_.  “Hey Meryl,” he said, “What’s in these?”

“Oat bran,” Meryl responded.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as Tessa visibly stiffened.  

Scott choked on his pancake in an an attempt to hold back his laughter.

\--

After Scott finished the dishes, he picked up the tulips he’d so readily whipped to the ground earlier that morning, trimmed the stems, and put them in some cold water.  Tessa watched him do it from where she was standing a few feet away, her arms crossed and her eyes locked on his hands as he spread the flowers out in the vase. There was something suspicious about how quiet and still she was being, something that Scott felt to be a sign that the reality of her situation was finally starting to catch up to her.  

He knew that it was only natural to be freaked out—he’d certainly been, when he’d woken up back in the past.  Still, he hated the thought that Tessa, who was such a “fixer”, who always meticulously planned for every eventuality and left-turn, was grappling with a situation of this magnitude that was so completely out of her control.  And Scott was more of a fixer himself than he often liked to admit, so he also hated this situation for himself, and he particularly hated that he couldn’t resolve any of this for his young partner.

But if he couldn’t fix this, Scott thought to himself, then the least he could do was show her around to make this situation a bit less scary.  He pasted on a calm smile, turned toward her, and said “Want to do an apartment tour?”

...at the exact same time that Tessa lifted her left hand, turned toward _him,_ and said “How long have we been engaged?”

Oh.  Right.   _That should probably take precedence over an apartment tour, yeah,_ Scott thought to himself.  “Not long at all,” he replied.  “About twelve hours, now.”

Tessa’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline. _“Really?”_ she asked.  

“Really,” Scott responded.  

“That’s…” Tessa trailed off, her mouth twisting down a little bit at the corners.  “That’s not what I thought you’d say,” she finished eventually. She was looking at Scott strangely, like she didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.  

“What do you mean by that?” Scott asked.  

“It’s just that the way you talked about her— _me_ —was so...I don’t know.  Calm, I guess. Like we’d figured everything out a long time ago.”  She paused for a moment, thinking. “I never did ask you, though. How long have we been…?”  And then she waved her hang back and forth between them, a gesture that seemed to imply _whatever the hell this is._

Scott watched for a moment, transfixed, as the light glinted off the surface of her ring while she moved.  It felt surreal. “Since the Olympics,” he said.

“Since _Vancouver?”_  Tessa questioned, clearly skeptical.  “That’s like what, nine years ago now?”

Scott shook his head.  “Not Vancouver,” he started.  “That’s…”

“So after the second one, then,” Tessa cut in, more sure this time.  “Since Russia.”

Scott shook his head again.  “No,” he said, realizing as he did that he probably should’ve been more clear from the get-go.  “Tess, things didn’t really change for us until after our _third_ Olympics, in Pyongchang.  It’s only been a year or so, now.”

“Our third Olympics,” Tessa half-whispered, almost reverent.  “God, it’s so weird to hear you even _say_ that.”  She sat there for a long moment, lost in thought, before her head suddenly snapped up.  “Wait a minute!” she exclaimed. “We’ve only been dating a _year_?”

Scott ducked his head, feeling sheepish.  “Sorry,” he said. “We kind of lived together before then, if that helps.”

“It does _not_ help,” Tessa snapped.  “What took us so long?”

“There were a lot of reasons,” Scott admitted.  “We didn’t want it to mess with our skating for a while, especially when we were younger.  So we agreed to hold off until we were sure that we could both handle it.”

Tessa raised her eyebrows at him, her bullshit meter seemingly reading him a lot more accurately than he’d suspected it to at sixteen.  “Yeah, but _a while_ isn’t the same as thirteen years,” she said.  

“Yeah, you’re right,” Scott allowed, knowing when he was beaten.  “There were definitely some other road bumps along the way.”

“Like what?” Tessa asked.  

“Like…” Scott paused, unsure of how much he should disclose.  

Yesterday, he would’ve just come out with it, telling Tessa whatever she wanted to know.  But now he had _his_ Tess’s voice was his head, warning him that if he messed up here he could screw up their whole future.  What if he told Tessa something that discouraged her from wanting to try to start anything romantic with him later on?  Or, even worse, what if he told her something that was too much for her to handle _at all_ , not just romantically but full-stop, and she made up her mind to _leave him_ and their partnership altogether?  

“Like I needed to get my head out of my own ass, basically,” Scott settled on, finally.  It was mostly true, anyway. “I messed up a lot—in a few different areas, but definitely with you in particular—and that ended up making us put this side of our relationship on the back burner for while.”  Scott cleared his throat, realizing how somber he was getting, and halfheartedly tried to switch his tone to something lighter. “So, you know, completely my bad.”

Tessa scoffed and rolled her eyes at him, and for a brief moment Scott felt paralyzed by fear, afraid that he’d still managed to say too much.  But then Tessa opened her mouth and informed him, “I don’t believe you.”

Scott frowned.  Maybe his hearing was going bad.  “What?” he checked.

“No way is _every problem_ between us in the past thirteen years your fault.  It’s just”—Tessa paused to sigh, gesturing widely at him as she did—“It’s statistically _impossible_ it what it is.”  

“You say that now,” Scott told her with a frown, “But you don’t know some of the stuff that’s happened, T.”  

“And I don’t _want_ to, because it would probably make me mad at thirty-one-year-old you on top of how mad I already am at eighteen-year-old you, but it definitely won’t change my mind,” she responded primly, crossing her arms over her chest.  “Look, maybe you _did_ mess up a bunch, Scott, but I’m sure I messed up plenty with you, too.”

Scott opened his mouth to correct her, to tell her that no, actually, he’d definitely done most of the leg work on the messing up front all on his own, but Tessa blazed on ahead before he had the change.

“But, okay, let’s even say that you’re kind of right and it’s _mostly_ your fault,” she continued.  “Still, even with whatever you said and did, I’m the one who’s in charge of what I said and did _back to you_ .  For example, last night you said some really mean things to me.  And I blame you for that, for starting a fight and for hurting my feelings.  But _I chose_ to make it worse by saying mean things back to you.  And then _I chose_ to walk away after.  So yeah,” Tessa finished lamely.  She cleared her throat, looking up and away, and Scott was surprised and alarmed to see his partner blinking back tears.  

“Aw T, c’mere,” Scott said.  He opened his arms and Tessa practically flew into them, burying her face into his chest  She tried to tip her head down and away, crying into Scott’s t-shirt, and it absolutely curdled Scott’s heart.  He hugged her tight and settled his cheek against her hair, breathing in her familiar scent. “I’m sorry,” he apologized,  “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

Tessa laughed a little and squeezed Scott harder in response.  “It’s okay,” she replied, and her voice was so soft and small that it made Scott want to wrap himself around her like a clinging vine and never let go.  “But stop trying to take all the credit for messing us up, okay? I may not be _your_ Tessa, but I am _a_ Tessa, so I know that I _definitely_ helped.”  

Scott swallowed hard, feeling a sudden wave of deja vu.  His Tess had been given him different iterations of this talk for about three and a half years, ever since they’d started their comeback.  She’d tried to get the message across in so many different ways—in her actions, in how she spoke to him and about him to others, and once, memorably, in a frustrated, point-blank monologue in the middle of an airport.  But something about being absolved by _this_ Tess—even though she couldn’t possibly fathom all the ways they would go on to hurt one another in the thirteen years that separated them—struck Scott with an unexpected potency.  

Maybe it felt different because Tess had been pretty much incapable of lying to him at sixteen, so he knew that she wasn’t hiding her true feelings for his benefit.  Or maybe he was touched by her love and compassion for him despite being on rocky ground (and getting rockier) with her own Scott. Or maybe it was just the simple fact that, against the odds and despite their jarringly different circumstances, this Tessa still seemed adamant about viewing their situation in exactly the same light at his own.

And if _that_ wasn’t a sign that Tessa Virtue’s stubbornness was infused in her down to her DNA, then Scott didn’t know what was.  

“Okay,” Scott said, after what was probably an unbelievably long pause.  “Okay, T. You’re right.”

Tessa pulled back a little to wipe her eyes with the sleeve of her pyjama shirt, and then she grinned up at him.  “Of course I’m right,” she told him smugly. “Now, what are we doing today?”

Scott tipped his head down to look at her, and for a few blissful second he was so happy that he felt physically incapable of not smiling back at her.  

Then he remembered.  Tessa’s Adidas shoot.  It was today. But Tessa—the one that they’d hired, at least—was definitely not available.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all!
> 
> We're almost done, here: we have two more main chapters to go (and then an epilogue or two after that). I'm actually a little sad to be nearing the end, to be honest. Thank you to everyone who's made it this far; I love getting your comments and kudos, and I'm glad to see that you're enjoying this story. <3


	14. The Flower And The Stem

After breakfast, Tessa and Scott excused themselves to go change into new clothes.  Which, naturally, meant that Tessa reeled him into her room, shut the door to keep Meryl and Charlie out of earshot, and started talking a mile a minute while stripping out of her pyjamas.

“So here’s the deal,” Tessa said, while simultaneously peeling out of her flannel sleep shirt, still facing him, like it was absolutely no big deal.  

Scott, however, got one half-second flash of Tessa’s cleavage and snapped his eyes shut, protesting.  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he tried to say without shouting, spreading his hands out in front of him as though to keep her at a distance.  “Warn a guy, jeez.”

“It’s not like you haven’t seen it before,” Tessa said, and she was probably rolling her eyes right now but there was absolutely _no way in hell_ Scott was going to check.  “Literally two days ago, actually.  And besides, we need to be quick. We’ve got to multitask, here.”

“That was different,” Scott protested.  “Different circumstances, different day, different _you_.”  

“Okay, so don’t look, then,” Tessa told him.  “You should get changed too, anyway; I think I saw your bag over by the bed.  But we should talk while you do.”

“Fine,” Scott agreed, even though he did _not_ share Tessa’s nonchalance.  He opened his eyes cautiously and made his way over to the side of the bed, where his suitcase was indeed sitting out, half-open.  Scott unzipped it the rest of the way, looked down, and was shocked (and a little irritated) to find that his clothes were neatly folded instead of just balled-up, which meant that Other Scott must have taken his things out, folded them, and repacked them.  It made Scott uncomfortable just thinking about it.

 _At what point do I become_ that _guy?_ Scott asked to himself as he grabbed a t-shirt at random.  

“I think we need to talk strategy,” Tessa informed him, breaking into his thoughts.  

“Yeah, probably,” Scott responded as he changed out his pyjama shirt for the new one.  “About what, though? The whole body-swap thing? Or just how to get through this day?”

“Both,” Tessa replied, “But mainly the first one.  My Scott said he and your Tessa had some notes about their theories and plan for all of this in her French folder.  We should probably read those while we talk, to see if they knew anything that we don’t.”

Scott dug out a pair of athletic shorts from the bottom of his bag and took a vindictive pleasure in how the rest of his clothes got re-rumpled as he rummaged around.  “Sure, yeah,” Scott said, putting the shorts on. “That would be in your backpack. Do you see it anywhere?”

“It’s next to my suitcase,” Tessa told him.  “Hold on; I’m almost dressed. I’ll get to it afterward.”  There was some rustling, then, and the sound of a zipper being done up.  Then, apropos of nothing, Tessa started to laugh. “Hey, I _miss_ this sweater,” she said, and Scott turned around to find her clutching the white cable-knit sweater she’d been wearing yesterday.  “It started to fall apart years ago, so I had to throw it out. I forgot all about it. Isn’t that strange?”

Scott shrugged, more than a little mystified by the suddenly fond, faraway look on her face.  Just a minute ago, she’d been all about laser-point focus and planning, and now she was getting hung up on a sweater?  He didn’t get it.

“It’s funny, the things you forget about,” Tessa explained, seeming to have sensed his confusion.  Her lips kicked up into this secretive little smile, like she was knew something that he didn't, and then her eyes were scanning more intently over Scott’s face and her weird fond-but-farway expression intensified.  “God, your face,” she sighed, seemingly out of the blue. She took a few steps toward him, and the whole composite of her made even less sense at close range: mouth twitching with a suppressed smile, eyebrows drawn together in thought, and eyes a little shiny like she was fighting tears back.  

“What?” Scott asked, confused.  

Tessa shook her head and said nothing, but she reached forward to rest her hand over Scott’s cheek at exactly the same time, her thumb smoothing delicately over his skin.

Scott’s heartbeat picked up and he stood stock-still, feeling even more confused than before.

“Nothing,” Tessa said, finally, her hand dropping back to her side.  “I’m just being nostalgic, I guess. But it’s just so...so _bizarre_ to be be back here.  I feel like I’m sorting through a hundred different memories all at once.  I forgot about so much of this, so many little things.”

And suddenly, puzzle pieces were beginning to slot together a bit more.  “Like what?” Scott asked, curious.

Tessa drew back a bit, her smile going from tender to impish.  “Like how you didn’t finish puberty until your twenties,” she told him, raising an eyebrow.  “God, you look so _young_.  I forgot all about that.”

“Hey!” Scott said.  He felt himself blushing from the tips of his ears all the way down to his neckline.  “I don’t look _that_ young!”

“You do!” Tessa insisted, and then she had a good long laugh at his expense while he continued to blush and look at his shoes, probably because she was a jerk and _not_ because it was actually funny at all.  “And I forgot about my hair, too!” she continued cheerily, reaching up to pull a piece of her ponytail forward and into her sightline.  “I actually kind of miss this color, sometimes. Do you want to know why I dyed it?” she asked him, and her eyes twinkled mischievously as she leaned toward him.  

Her enthusiasm was infectious, and Scott found himself grinning ear to ear in response.  “Sure, why did you dye it?” Scott prompted her.

“Because Igor told me to stop drinking chocolate milk,” she replied, like the correlation between those two things should be crystal clear.  “And because Marina kept lecturing me about working to _match your edges_.”

Scott frowned.  That made literally no sense, and he told her so.  

“Igor thought I was getting too fat for you to lift, and Marina thought I was the weaker partner,” Tessa said, and Scott felt it immediately as his hackles went up.  

He wanted to jump in and tell her that she was wrong, or at least to tell her that he was planning on having a shouting match with both of their coaches the very second that they got back to Canton, but she blazed right on ahead before he had the chance.

“I had this whole team of people micromanaging my life,” she said.  “Someone told me when to sleep and what to eat and how to look and walk and talk and skate, every minute of every day.  So I dyed my hair as a big red ‘fuck you’.” Tessa paused her little speech to smile, wide and broad and triumphant. “I did it for _me_ , because it was the one thing _I_ got to do whether or not anybody else liked it.  It was the bravest thing I’d ever done.”

Scott stood there for a moment with his mouth hanging open like an idiot, completely floored.  Sometimes, like right now, he felt like Tessa’s brain ran on a completely different operating system than his because he _never_ would have put that together on his own.  But now that she’d explained it, it made perfect sense—in a sideways Tessa way, anyway.  “Huh,” he said. “I had no idea. I’m sorry I teased you for getting it dyed, then.”

“It’s been thirteen years since then,” she reminded him, “So I’m over it.”  But her expression softened ever so slightly, so Scott knew that he’d done something right.  

The two of them just stood and looked at one another for a minute, smiling, and a comfortable quiet settled between them.  Then the sound of the shower turning on in the other room interrupted, snapping them back to action.

“So the plan,” Tessa said, reaching for her backpack and pulling out her French folder, which was jam-packed with papers that probably weren’t related to her coursework.  “Let’s do this.”

And so they did.  Tessa pulled a massive timeline and a stack of other little notes from the folder, and they sat themselves down on the ground and filtered through them while they talked.  Tessa took out a sheet of looseleaf from the back of her folder to jot down some notes of her own as they worked. About fifteen minutes later, they had agreed on the following five points:

  1. Our pasts are exactly the same except for this spring break and the training week before it
  2. Whatever is causing us to time travel, it’s only happening while we’re asleep and together
  3. Each switch has happened within a twenty mile radius of this house
  4. A conflict has preceded each switch from our proper bodies; a solution to a conflict has preceded each switch back to them



Agreeing on a plan, however, appeared to be tricker.  After the swap last night, Tessa was convinced that the third point, location, was the most important.  But Scott, who was still feeling guilty as hell about fighting with T, thought that the fourth one, their relationship, played a larger role.  They went back and forth on it for a few minutes without much progress, and Scott _definitely_ thought that he was the one with the right idea, here, but Tessa wasn’t listening to him (although to be fair he wasn’t listening to her either).  He continued to disagree with her, Tessa continued to disagree with him, and Scott had a feeling that they could’ve _really_ started to get into it but then the shower turned off and they both had the sudden realization that this might not be the best use of their limited planning time.

“This is pointless,” Tessa sighed.  “We need to come up with a short-term plan now, before we have to go back out there.  We’ll do long-term later.”

“Okay, yeah,” Scott agreed.  “So what’re you thinking for a short-term plan?”

“Act natural?” Tessa said with a shrug, displaying none of the rigorous head for planning that she’d displayed to this point.  “Maybe we should start by exchanging what we each figured out about our day yesterday.”

“Sure,” Scott said, preparing himself to feel guilty about how little information he’d absorbed.  But before they got started, Scott couldn’t help but wonder: “What are we doing in Montreal today, by the way?”

“Oh, nothing much, I’m sure,” Tessa told him dismissively.  “I was supposed to be modeling for a pretty big photo shoot in the morning,” she mused, and Scott had just enough time to start to panic about how in the world his quiet, quick-blushing partner was going to manage to model _anything_ before Tessa continued with “But I’m sure you called and rescheduled, under the circumstances.”

Scott let out a sigh of relief, glad for the first time that Older Scott was in charge of something; if he’d been there, Tessa probably would’ve been going to that photoshoot, sixteen or not.  Which was, you know, an absolutely terrible idea.

“And after that we have a long weekend,” Tessa finished, seemingly oblivious to her partner’s relief.  “But anyway, do you want to start telling me your half or should I go first?”

“Hm,” Scott said, “Why don’t we start with you.”  

\--

 _This whole situation,_ Scott thought to himself, _is an absolutely terrible idea._

The whole situation, of course, being that he was currently cruising down the highway to the location of Tessa’s Adidas photoshoot with the _wrong_ Tessa in the passenger seat.  He’d been mulling it over for the whole drive, replaying their conversation in his head, and he still couldn’t believe he’d let her talk him into this.  

After he’d realized that the Adidas shoot was supposed to be today, he’d laid the whole situation out to Tessa and explained that he was going to have to call and cancel the shoot before they did anything else—or reschedule it, at the very least.  But Tessa had protested. Specifically, she’d said “No way, Scott, that is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, I am _absolutely going_ to that photoshoot.”  

Scott had tried to talk her down from the ledge by citing all the possible problems that would cause, Tessa had pushed back and refuted each one, and in the end it had come down to a point where they were having a conversation about whether or not this younger version of Tessa could be relied upon for this task.  In the end, it had led to a point where if Scott wanted to get his way he would have been forced to say that this Tessa wasn’t _good enough_ in some way.  And that was a conclusion that Scott hadn’t wanted to touch with a ten-foot pole, so he’d found himself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

“I can _do this_ , Scott,” Tessa had insisted earnestly and for about the twentieth time, her eyes wide and hopeful her brow crunched up with determination.  “Why won’t you just let me try?”

And Scott had thought about it for one dangerous second, had thought about looking at his partner and saying, to her face, “because you aren’t the right Tessa for this job.”  But she was so _young_ and Scott knew that she would’ve taken “the right Tessa for this job” to mean “the right Tessa, full-stop, period”, and he also knew that she would’ve taken that false meaning to heart and _believed him_ about it like it was a fact and then let that "fact" sit and rankle inside her until she couldn’t stand it anymore.

So he hadn’t been able to do it.  Instead, he’d fallen victim to her horrifyingly effective puppy eyes and caved and agreed to let her do the shoot (“but only if you’re sure, T, only if you’re _absolutely sure_ ” he’d added, trying to give them both one last out).  

He hadn’t been a total idiot about it, though; he was capable of least a _little_ foresight, so he’d added a few conditions to Tessa’s going to this shoot.  The first was that either of them would “tap out” if they felt uncomfortable at any point; they’d come up with the code word Ilderton (obscure enough to avoid mentioning by mistake but still able to be easily worked into a conversation if the need arose) to be used in this instance, at which point Scott would enact a bail-out plan to get them both out of the building ASAP.  The second condition was that Scott would be allowed to stay in the room with her for the whole shoot, start to finish, in case she needed an assist. And the third, a rule that felt unwieldy because it was usually something that Tessa insisted on for _him_ rather than the other way around, was that Tessa keep their relationship quiet.  

The third rule was the only one Tessa had pushed back on.  “Okay, I can take the ring off," she’d started, and then she’d reached up and tugged the collar of her shirt down and to the side, showing off the long line of bruises that Scott’s mouth and teeth may or may not have had a part in creating, “But what about these?”

Scott, naturally, had blushed so hard that he felt like he was going to turn purple and informed her that this was not the first time something like this had happened.  “The crews, ah, they _kind of_ know,” he’d admitted, “Or at least they have some idea.  But they don’t _really_ know. I mean, in theory those could have come from anyone.”

“So just keep it vague, then?” Tessa had checked, mercifully letting go of her shirt.  

“Yeah, pretty much,” Scott had replied.  

And so here they were, pulling into the parking lot of an old warehouse downtown, Tessa all but vibrating with anticipation and Scott just about ready to puke his guts up with nervousness.  

As Scott led them inside, his inner monologue was just a long, continuous rephrain of _t_ _his is a mistake, this is a mistake, this is a huge, GIGANTIC mistake_ , a sentiment which continued as they were introduced to the crew, the photographer, and the hair and makeup team, all of whom were (thank god for small blessings) unfamiliar.  

Scott watched from a few feet away in a state of absolute terror as Tessa chatted casually with the photographer about her goals for the shoot, as she double-checked the clothes she’d be wearing, and as she okayed the set and props.  At each step in the process, Scott watched and waited while internally wincing, ready for the inevitable crisis to arise, ready to hear the word “Ilderton” and preparing to fake a heart attack or something to get the two of them out. But five minutes passed, and then ten, and nothing happened.  Tessa smiled and chatted easily under the spotlight, grinning and joking with the crew. And then suddenly all the prep work was over and Tessa was being guided down for hair and makeup.

“Can you take off your sweater, please?” the makeup artist (Shaylene, maybe?) asked Tessa.  

“Sure,” Tessa agreed, unbothered.  And then she peeled off her blush-pink sweater and sat there in her black sports bra like it was nothing, the line of bright-red bruises on her skin standing out clear as day.

“Whoa,” maybe-Shaylene laughed, gesturing at them.  “That sure is _something_ you’ve got going on, there.”  

Scott’s heart leapt up into his throat, and he knew he was blushing.  He could feel maybe-Shaylene’s eyes suddenly trained on him, sharp and questioning.  

But Tessa just laughed.  “You should see the other guy,” she said.  And then, as her makeup artist laughed right along with her, Tessa turned her head toward Scott and _winked_.  Scott snorted, unable to help himself, maybe-Shaylene’s expression softened, and then she turned back to Tess and the conversation moved on like nothing had happened at all.  

Deep down in his gut, Scott felt something uncoil.  

All morning, he’d been waiting for his partner to make a misstep or a wrong turn, which wouldn’t have been surprising given that she was a sixteen-year-old going into a high-pressure situation grossly underprepared and on unforgivably short notice.  But he’d forgotten something: his partner, sixteen or not, unprepared or not, was still Tessa Virtue. And Tessa Virtue always seemed to rise to the occasion.

\--

The original plan for the day, according to Charlie, had been to rig up some sort of motor setup for the old row boat to get over to Isle Royale.  And while that sounded pretty great (and Scott totally would’ve been down for it if he didn’t have, you know, _other stuff_ to do that was kind of a lot more important), it had been a relief when they’d walked outside after breakfast, taken a look at the massive white-capped waves crashing to shore, and immediately put the kibosh on the boating plan.  

“Why don’t we just hang out in the morning and see if the waves die down,” Tessa had suggested, and to Scott’s eye she’d looked a little too cat-that-got-the-cream to be believably making an innocent suggestion.  “If they do, we can try to go in the afternoon; otherwise, we can go do something else.”

“Great idea, Tess,” Scott had enthused, trying to play into to whatever it was she was going for, but the way Tessa had struggled to hold back a wince told him that he might have overshot the enthusiasm.  

Meryl and Charlie had looked from Tessa to Scott and then back at one another, the uncomfortably knowing expressions that they’d been wearing at breakfast making a comeback.  

“Sure,” Charlie had agreed after a minute.  “Why not?”

“Great!” Tessa had said, and then she’d snatched Scott by the elbow, dragged him back into the bedroom, and together they formulated something which Scott was privately calling The Compromise Plan.  Much like the earlier, short-term stopgap plan back in Montreal, it was mainly Tessa’s brainchild, but Scott appreciated that this time he was being let in on the scheming process, even though that mainly meant listening to Tessa talk a mile a minute while he made a valiant effort to absorb what she was saying.  

Since they still didn’t agree on whether location or a learning a lesson was the most important trigger for their time-traveling, The Compromise Plan was developed to address both.  Despite all of Tessa's intricate prep work, the end product came out was cleaner than the stopgap plan, Scott thought.  There were only three steps, and the purpose of each was clear. They were as follows:

Step 1: Wait a little while to avoid being super suspicious, then take your truck get the fuck out of Upper Michigan.

Step 2: Use the drive out of here to talk through any and all ongoing conflicts we have with one another, either in this reality or in the future, working from written lists that we are going to spend the next hour making to ensure that that they cover absolutely everything.

Step 3: fall asleep in literally anyplace but Northern Michigan, never come back to this godforsaken place again, and never EVER fall asleep here for the rest of our lives if it kills us.  ( _I’m serious, Scott,_ Tessa intoned, _I don’t care how pretty it is, we are never. coming. back._ )

And so, with The Compromise Plan firmly in place, Tessa provided each of them with a pen and a piece of notebook paper, and they started to compose their separate complaint lists, working on opposite ends of the room so that they couldn’t snoop.

Before he started writing, Scott took a moment to stare quietly at the back of Tessa’s head as she scribbled industriously away.  He knew he should be busy going down his laundry list of all the usual stuff that bothered him, but he just couldn’t make himself do it.  It was all petty shit, stuff that didn’t matter, really. A couple of days ago he would’ve been filling the paper up with complaints about how much it bothered him that Tessa was always so shy and so high-strung and so superstitious and so perfectionistic, but now that didn’t feel like the right thing to do.   _I guess I actually kind of don’t mind most of that stuff,_ he decided _.  I mean, some of it isn’t always fun, but she wouldn’t really be Tessa without it_.  

So he didn’t write any of those first complaints down.  Instead, he put his pen to paper and wrote a much shorter, much more truthful list.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well hello! 
> 
> I know it's been quite a while, but I'm finally back with another update; provided that I don't decided to break up the last chapter, this should be the second-to-last update ever on this story (excluding epilogues, which I'll probably release either concurrently with or shortly after the last chapter). 
> 
> For those of you who have somehow managed to stick with me: thank you! I really appreciate all of your kind words and your interest in this story. <3


	15. The Final Pose

Midafternoon was finally upon them, which meant that it was time to put the Compromise Plan, aka Operation Get the Fuck Out of Michigan, into motion.  Tessa and Scott had packed up their suitcases after lunch (which had been breakfast leftovers, to Tess’s intense dissatisfaction, the pancakes made slightly more palatable by the addition of yogurt and fruit and significantly more palatable by the half sleeve of Oreo cookies that Charlie wouldn’t share until they promised him three different times that they wouldn’t tell Meryl about them).  

Now, Tessa was sitting back in the kitchen talking with Charlie and Meryl to distract them from Scott as he lugged their bags back to his truck.  The riskiest moment of this whole deal was the two-ish seconds when he had to streak right past the kitchen entryway laiden down like a pack mule with all of his and Tessa's shit, which was a decidedly non-subtle look.  As Scott approached the doorway, Tess’s bag hanging over his shoulder and their comforters wrapped around his back like a massive shawl and his own suitcase hugged tight to his chest, he couldn’t help but think to himself that  _ this is a terrible plan, like, maybe the worst plan ever, and I’m for sure gonna get caught. _

But then Scott passed in front of the doorway, his head down, speed-walking with purpose, and no one stopped him.  The sound of Tessa’s laugh floated up to his ears, and although it was definitely did  _ not _ sound like her genuine one to Scott’s ear, it was definitely close enough that he doubted Meryl and Charlie would notice.  

And sure enough, Meryl and Charlie’s laughter echoed back over to him as he successfully rounded the bend and—home free!—headed for the front door, his adrenaline pumping like he’d just managed to pull off the heist of the century instead of the world’s most awkward luggage extraction.  Still, Scott was flying high when he opened the door of the truck, pushed the passenger seat forward, and dumped everything unceremoniously onto the back bench seat. Then he locked up for appearances’ sake, careful to only press the button once so the car wouldn’t beep and give him away, and made his way back to the house.  

Scott walked into the kitchen to find Meryl and Charlie bent over laughing riotously while Tessa held court, grinning like the cat who got the cream while she told the story of the time her roomate at Junior Worlds had gotten food poisoning on the night before Tess’s event.  Scott watched in amusement as the scene unfolded, feeling strangely proud.  _ Looks like it only takes 29 years for you to finally learn how to deliver a punchline, T _ , he couldn’t help but think.  

He waited for everyone to unwind a little bit before finally interrupting, stepping up behind T and clapping a friendly hand on her shoulder.  

Tessa didn’t even flinch.  “What took you so long?” she asked him jovially, a self-satisfied smirk still plastered across her face and a mischievous glint starting in her eyes that Scott felt immediately wary of.  “Fixing your hair or something?” 

Scott opened his mouth, trying to summon up some kind of comeback to Tessa’s unexpected teasing, but in the end nothing came to him and he was forced to snap it shut again after several seconds of gaping like a fish.  

“Or something,” Charlie answered for him, and then he gave Scott a longlook that Scott didn’t care for at all.  

“Jeez,” Scott groaned dramatically, his frustration only halfway an act, “What’s with the third degree, T?  I was just coming to ask if you’re ready to go.” 

Tessa popped up immediately, grinning widely at him.  “I’m ready,” she replied. 

“Where are you two off to?” Meryl drawled, raising a very judgemental eyebrow at them.  

“We’re eloping,” Tessa said, deadpan.  

Scott felt it as his eyes bugged out of his head, but he couldn’t help it.  He felt like he was about to choke on his own spit. 

But Tessa paid him no mind.  “Bye, guys,” she said, taking Scott by the hand and halfway-dragging him out of the kitchen.  “See you later.” 

She didn’t let go of his hand until they’d reached the car, and even then she only let go so that she could take his keys out of his pocket for him, unlock the car, and push him vaguely in the direction of the driver’s side door.  “You said you wanted the first shift,” she reminded him. “Remember?”

“Oh yeah,” Scott said.  And then, on autopilot, he hopped into the driver’s seat, started the car, and turned around to head back down the long, winding driveway.  Tessa leaned back in the passenger seat next to him and tucked her feet up under her, probably getting mud all over the seat. If the circumstances had been different, he probably would’ve lectured her about it, but as it was his mind was otherwise occupied.  

He waited until they’d made it back onto the main road before he turned toward her, still a little shell-shocked, and asked “ _ Eloping,  _ Tess?”

Tessa shrugged, looking perfectly nonchalant.  “Well,” she said, “It’s not like you were going to think of anything better.”

“I guess,” he replied.  Still, he couldn’t shake the strange feeling that her words had stirred up in him, even long after the house had faded into the distance.

\--

Back in Montreal, Scott and Tessa were wrapping up a celebratory lunch back at their apartment: cold cuts and cheese on french bread, fruit, half a bar of chocolate each, and, despite Scott’s moral conundrum about whether he was promoting underage drinking if Tess’s body was over the legal limit, the tail end of a bottle of prosecco.  

After the shoot, Scott had taken Tess on a long walk through one of their favorite parks in the city, then through their favorite part of their neighborhood in Le Plat, and finally home when their stomachs had started to complain too loudly to be ignored.  The whole time, Tess had been asking questions and then talking on and off about the shoot, their apartment, and their life in Montreal with a glowing, endless energy that Scott always forgot she was capable of. She was still talking about it, actually, nearly two hours later.  

“I can’t believe that this is seriously my life,” she proclaimed, setting down her sandwich to crane her neck for another look at her surroundings, as though their flat, with its leaky shower and endless street noise and the draft that never seemed to go away even in summer, was the absolute best thing she’d ever seen. “I mean, seriously, Scott.  I’m here in a beautiful apartment in downtown Montreal with eight  _ Olympic metals _ in my sock drawer, fresh off a photo shoot with  _ Adidas _ , heading into a long weekend with my best friend on the planet who wants to spend the rest of his life with me.  And you can  _ cook  _ and I’m getting my master’s and we have a standing lunch date with our  _ actual heros  _ Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon.  I think that this might be the best day of my life.”  

Scott paused for a moment, unsure of how to respond.  Now that his partner had put it like that, he could see how, to a seventeen-year-old Tessa, this  _ was _ probably pretty cool.  But it was bizarre, too, because he hadn’t thought she’d see things this way.  After all, he’d known since he was eight years old that Tessa was capable of total world domination if she put her mind to it; a nice apartment and reasonable vacation time seemed a little dull compared to that.  Maybe it was just the guilt complex talking, but Scott had always been afraid that Tessa’s dreams for her life had been grander when she was young, and that she was somehow settling for his sake. 

But it was kind of hard to hold onto that feeling when that younger version of Tessa was right here in front of him, acting the exact opposite of disappointed.   _ Well _ , he thought to himself,  _ maybe I was wrong. _  “I’m glad you’re happy, Tess,” he told her finally.  

Tessa grinned back at him, that goobery wide grin that she only did when she really meant it.  “Of course I am,” she replied. 

Deep down in his chest, Scott felt a weight lift away.  

\--

Scott and Tessa had just made it out of L’anse, and they were driving south on the 41, trees flying cheerfully by them on either side, when Tessa leaned forward and dialed down the volume on the radio.  “We should to do our lists,” she told him. 

Scott swallowed hard, a little sick to his stomach.  His folded-up little confession sheet suddenly felt like it was burning a hole in his back pocket.  “Okay,” he said. 

“Do you care if I go first?” Tessa asked.  

“No, go ahead.”

He must’ve answered too quickly, nervousness getting the better of him, because the pause after he finished speaking felt long and stagnant.  He didn’t dare turn to look at Tessa, so he tried to lean up and sneak a peek of her in the rearview mirror instead. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, and her mouth was twisted down.  “Are you sure, Scott?” he watched her say. 

“Yeah,” Scott replied, and then he focused back on the road before he steered them right into a ditch.  “I’m sure.” 

“Well, okay then,” Tessa said.  She reached down, digging around in her bag, and came up with a single piece of neatly-folded notebook paper.  “Number one,” she began. “Communicate better.” 

Scott frowned, not sure what he was supposed to say to that.   

“That’s for both past-us and present-us,” Tessa continued, “Just to be clear.  We’ve had a lot of arguments, and I know we’re going to have more in the future, but things would be a lot easier on both of us if we stopped thinking that we can read each other’s minds.  Since we’ve been kids, people have always talked about how we’re these perfect halves, that we should have this flawless intuitive understanding of each other that spreads across our whole lives.  And honestly, that’s bullshit. We’re each our own whole person, with our own whole brain. So we shouldn’t have to feel angry at ourselves or each other when we don’t intuitively  _ know  _ what’s wrong.  When I want you to understand what I’m thinking, I should tell you, and when you aren’t sure about something, you should ask.  I’ve realized that this week more than I have in a long time.”

Scott nodded, feeling physically lightened by Tessa’s words.  “Yeah, for sure,” he agreed. He paused, peering over at Tessa to gauge whether it was a good idea, and then continued.  “Can I ask you something, then? In the spirit of transparency?”

“Sure,” Tessa replied.

He tried to keep his face stoic, but it was hard to rein in the smile that started to curl up at the corners of his mouth.  “Does it actually bother you that I don’t like Hall and Oates?” he asked her.

Instead of answering, Tessa cleared her throat and looked back down at her list.  “Number four,” she read, sounding very official. “Learn, for the sake of our partnership, to appreciate Hall and Oates.”  

“No way,” Scott laughed, “You did  _ not  _ write that!”  

“I did!” Tessa insisted, with perfect seriousness.  She held the paper up so that Scott could see, and Scott’s eyes flicked over to it for just long enough to observe that  _ Hall and Oates _ was indeed scrawled at the bottom of the page.  “I thought it would be a good note to end on.” She maintained her seriousness for about another half-second, and then her whole face broke out into a broad grin and she burst into loud, explosive,  _ genuine _ laughter.  

It was infectious, and Scott couldn’t help but laugh right along with her.

“There are only four things on your list?” he asked, once they’d finally settled down.  

“Yeah,” Tessa replied, “Why?”

Scott shrugged.  “You were writing for a long time,” he said, “That’s all.”  

“I was just sorting out my thoughts, mostly,” Tessa responded.  

“Oh,” Scott said.  He couldn’t help but feel relieved.  

“Ready for number two, now?” Tessa asked.  

Scott took a loud, deep breath, pretending to psych himself up.  “Hit me with it.”

“Remember our limits,” Tessa read.  She paused, looking up at Scott and smiled.  “That’s a little vague, but I think you might have an idea of where I’m going with this.  We live life on top of one another so much that sometimes it feels like I’m more aware of you than I am of myself.  And that can be great for our skating, of course, but it also makes it easy to hurt each other. You know so many things about me that nobody else does—about my family, about what I’m afraid of, about what I want out of life—and I know the same about you.  And it can feel like the easiest, most natural thing in the world for us to use that knowledge against one another, but it’s also something that I’m terrified of. It’s so much power to have over another person, and if we use it wrong we could actually  _ break  _ each other with it.  Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

Scott swallowed thickly, feeling like all the air had suddenly drained out of the car.  “Yeah,” he admitted. “I do.” 

“Not that I think we’ve ever reached that point,” Tessa qualified.  “But there have been times where we came close. You’re my partner and my best friend, and we’ve grown up together for our whole lives, so naturally we’ve shaped each other; I just want to make sure that shaping is for better and not for worse, right?”

“Right,” Scott replied.  “Yeah, I know.” He stared quietly ahead for a while, lost in his own thoughts and unsure of what else to say other than  _ yeah, you’re right, but I have no idea how to actually  _ do _ that effectively. _  In the end, he just said that, flat-out.  

“Well,” Tessa said, and then she stopped herself mid-sentence to bite thoughtfully at a hangnail.  “I guess the only way to get better at talking about boundaries: what information is public, what information is for just between us, and what things we don’t want to talk about even with each other.  And then we have to stay committed to those boundaries, even when we fight.” 

It sounded so simple when it was put that way, but Scott knew better: they’d been playing their weaknesses off of each other for so long that had become a habit, and that wasn’t something that a single, resolute conversation in a truck could fix.  

The two of them sat in silence for a few minutes, lost to their own thoughts, before Tessa pulled them back to the present again.  “Ready for number three?” she asked, finally. 

“Yeah,” Scott replied.  “Okay, sure.” 

“Nothing is inevitable,” Tessa read.  Scott was still looking ahead, focusing purposefully on the road, but he could hear the sharp sound of Tessa dragging her nail nervously over the edge of the paper.  “I’ll be honest: that one is more for me than for you; I don’t think you’ve ever worried about that as much as I have.”

“Probably not,” Scott agreed, feeling confused.  “I’m not even sure I know what you mean.”

“Well, mainly, I don’t want us to do anything in our lives because we think it’s been predestined somehow.  I don’t want you to be my best friend just because you see me more than anyone else. I don’t want you to stay my partner just because we’ve been together for so long.  And I don’t want you to date me because other people think we should.”

“Oh,” Scott said, frowning.  He hadn’t thought about their situation that way before, and he wasn’t totally sure he liked the implication; it was the first point Tessa had made that he didn’t agree with.  “But isn’t that kind of the point, though?” he asked. “I mean, I  _ like  _ knowing that we’re going to stick by each other.  I  _ like  _ that I don’t have to decide every morning to be your partner or your friend because of all the days that came before.  What’s the use in building something if you can’t count on it?”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Tessa replied.  “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be able to count on me, Scott; I’m saying that you shouldn’t feel like you  _ have to. _  Our history is always going to be there, and we’re always going to have that, but I don’t ever want you to feel like it’s an unbreakable obligation.  And I don’t want us to choose it just because it’s easier or simpler than choosing something else.” 

“Do you really feel like that?” Scott couldn’t help but ask.  He felt like he was going to throw up, just thinking about it.  “Do you think you stuck around just because you had to? Because it was the easiest thing to do?”

“No, Scott,” Tessa replied, emphatically.  She placed her left hand over his right, where it was clutching the steering wheel in a death grip.  “No, I don’t think that at all. I just wanted to be sure that you didn’t feel that way, either.” 

“Of course not,” Scott responded.  He was actually kind of angry that she even had to ask.  “No, god, of course not, Tess. I don’t just stick around because I have to, okay?  Don’t  _ ever _ think that.  I do it because you’re my partner and my friend and I  _ want  _ to.”  

“Okay,” Tessa said, giving his hand a squeeze.  “Okay, good; I just wanted to be sure.” 

“Well,” Scott said, still more than a little mad, “Now you’re sure, alright?  Case closed on that one: I don’t secretly hate you.” But, because he also kind of understood where Tessa was coming from, he turned his hand over as a peace offering, and then he held on tightly when she laced their fingers together.  “Sorry if I made you worry about that,” he said, quietly, because he couldn’t stand even the idea of it. 

Tessa smoothed her thumb over the back of Scott’s hand, the gesture measured and calm.  “It’s okay,” she said. “Sorry I never told you before.” 

Scott brought their joined hands to his chest for a moment, holding them over his heart.  “It’s okay,” he said. 

A few minutes later they stopped for gas and a driver change, and it wasn’t until he was standing there watching the numbers on the pump go up that he realized that it was going to be his turn, now, to go through his list.  Scott cast a wistful look at the trash can behind him, and for a moment he was tempted to just rip it up and throw it away and claim that he had nothing to say. 

But then Tessa came back from the bathroom with a coffee in each hand and he lost his nerve.  

“Ready to go?” she asked.

“Almost,” Scott replied.  

He handed Tess the keys, and she unlocked the car and went to adjust the driver’s seat while he waited out the pump.  By the time he clambered into the passenger seat, she was already set to go, sunglasses on and her hand hovering over the ignition.  

“Okay,” Scott said, sliding in next to her, “Ready.”  

Another car had boxed them into their spot, so Tessa turned the key and put it in reverse, backing them easily out of the narrow space; at seventeen, she normally would’ve asked Scott to do it.  “Seatbelt,” Tessa said without so much as taking her eyes from the rearview mirror, before the automatic warning system even had the chance. 

“Oh, right,” Scott replied, and then he reached over and buckled up.  

Tessa gave Scott approximately two minutes to get himself together before she asked him about his list.  

“I’ve got it,” he confirmed, pulling it out of his pocket and starting to unfold it very, very slowly.  It was even shorter than Tessa’s, only two items long, but Scott felt nervous all the same. 

“Okay,” Tessa prompted him, “So what do you have?”

Scott down at his list, up at Tess, and then back down.  “Say sorry more,” he read, and his voice sounded embarrassingly hesitant even to his own ears.  

“What do you mean by that?” Tessa asked.  

“I just feel like we’ve messed up a lot, maybe me more than you, I don’t know, but that we always just kind of let it sit and then forget about it,” Scott replied.  “Which, I mean, on the one hand it’s good, because we fight less, but on the other hand then we never actually get to solve anything; we just move past it. And I don’t want to do that anymore; if I do something that bothers you, I want you to tell me instead of keeping it to yourself.  And I want to be able to ask you how to fix it.” 

“That’s fair,” Tessa said.  “I understand that. Sometimes, especially when I was younger, I felt like I didn’t know how to bring things up with you, or I didn’t know what was important enough to talk about.”  

“Well, it’s hard to figure that out if you never say anything about anything,” Scott replied, shrugging.  “You’re better at it than my Tess, for sure; you don’t let me get away with as much shit. But with her, I honestly don’t know sometimes when things bother her because she’ll just let me keep going and pretend it’s fine until way, way later.  And then I feel bad about it, yeah, but I also don’t know how I could’ve done anything differently. So that’s more what I mean. I want to be nicer to you and say sorry more, but I also want you to help me by telling me when I mess up.” 

“Okay,” Tessa said, and she actually looked kind of...touched, maybe?  Definitely relieved, at the very least. “You should say that—exactly that way, how you just said it—to your Tess when we switch back.  I think it will definitely help.” 

“I’ve got one more thing,” Scott said.  He looked down at his list, feeling a little anxious again, and then he just read it right of the page.  “Be honest with each other,” he said, and he saw Tessa gearing up to respond, already, but he had more he wanted to say yet, so he just pushed on through.  “The hardest part about this whole time-traveling situation for me was that you had so many secrets to keep from me. And it’s the same with my Tess, too: half the time I feel like we’re fighting or arguing or whatever because we’re trying not to say things to each other, or we’re trying to hide something from each other, and I don’t want to do it anymore.  I feel like, for us to get to that place you talked about where we respect each other’s boundaries and trust each other and all of that, we have to be honest about where we are.”

“I think so, too,” Tessa replied.  “And I’m sorry that I had to keep so much from you when we were in Montreal.”  

“It’s alright,” Scott said.  “I know why you did it. But it’s just what got me thinking about this, is all.”  

Tessa nodded.  “Is there anything you want to know in particular?” she asked, after a while.  

Scott surprised even himself by responding “Yeah, actually.”

“What is it?” Tessa asked.

“Do you ever get me to skate to Pride and Prejudice?”

Tessa threw back her head and laughed, the sound shocked right out of her.  “Not yet,” she admitted. “But there’s still plenty of time.” 

The jovial air between them lasted for the rest of the drive, through a greasy fast-food dinner, and even as they checked into their shitty motel room and got ready to turn in for the night.

It wasn’t until Scott was sitting there with the lights off, staring at the back of Tessa’s head from the other bed, that he realized this would be the last time he’d ever see this version of Tessa if everything went to plan.  

“Hey,” he whispered over at her.  “Hey, T, are you awake?”

Tessa rolled over, and suddenly her eyes, wide and serious, were looking right at him.  “Yes,” she replied, unnecessarily. “What is it?” 

There were a thousand things he wanted to say to Tess, at that moment.   _ Thank you. _  And  _ I love you. _  And  _ I’m going to miss you more than I know how to say.  _  But, suddenly, Scott felt tongue-tied.  “Nothing,” Scott said, finally. “Just...goodnight, Tess.”  

Tessa hesitated, her eyes scanning his face in the dim light.  “Do you want to come over here by me?” she asked finally. 

“Yeah,” Scott admitted, feeling guilty, and then he quickly crowded himself in next to Tessa before he had the chance to chicken out.  

The two of them shuffled for a minute, each trying to find a comfortable spot without touching one another on the little full-sized bed, and in the end Tessa sighed, reached over, and pulled Scott right up against her, chest to chest.  Scott rested his cheek against Tessa’s shoulder and placed an arm around her middle, his palm resting uncertainly against the small of her back.

“Goodnight, Scott,” Tessa said.  

Scott held his breath for a long time, tears stinging back behind his eyelids, as he tried to think of something meaningful to say.  It didn’t come, and then his eyelids started to get heavy, and then it was too late. 

Scott fell asleep, and dreamed of things he wouldn’t remember in the morning.

\--

Tessa turned over on the couch to face her partner about twenty minutes into an episode of M*A*S*H, a strange look on her face.  “Scott,” she said suddenly.

And Scott, sensing the beginning of something important, hit pause.  “What is it?” he asked. 

“What if this never ends?” Tessa asked.  “What you and I and Other-Tess and Other-Scott are stuck like this, swapping back and forth forever?”

He paused for a moment, deciding whether he should go for serious or light.  “Well, we’re probably going to have to get a lot more creative with our skating choreography, for starters,” he replied, deciding to keep it light.

“I’m serious, here,” Tessa insisted.  “It  _ is _ possible, isn’t it?”

“Honestly,” Scott responded, “Even if that happens, I know we could work something out.  But I don’t think so. I think this is all going to resolve soon, and things are going to go back to the way they were before.”  

Tessa’s eyes flicked past him, then, focusing on something just behind his head.  “And what if I don’t  _ want  _ things to go back to how they were before?” she asked him.  “What then?”

“I don’t know, Tess,” Scott admitted, and something about what she’d said, either the words themselves or the expression on her face as she said them, spooked him.

Long after they parted that night, Scott found himself staring up at the ceiling of the guest bedroom, thinking.  It took him a long time to fall asleep. 


	16. Travelling Is Overrated

Scott woke up that morning with a strange, unshakeable sense of deja-vu that wouldn’t seem to quit.  It lasted through his shower and breakfast, and it didn’t let up as he drove to Arctic Edge for his last morning practice of the week.  Tessa was meeting him at the rink these days, proud to have her own driver’s license and whatever, so he didn’t get to see her until right before they got onto the ice, while he was lacing up his skates just outside the boards.  

Her expression was about as sour as it always was at 5 AM and she didn’t even look at him over the top of her coffee thermos, but the second Scott locked eyes on her his heart started beating like it was trying to break straight out of his chest.  

“Tess!” he halfway-shouted, jumping up from his bench with only one skate on and half-hobbling over to her for a hug, as though he hadn’t seen her less than twelve hours ago.

Tessa didn’t seem to mind.  “Hey, Scott!” she replied, sounding much more cheerful than she usually was at this hour, and she wrapped her arms around him and squeezed him tight.  

“Ready to kick some ass today, kiddo?” he asked her, once they’d broken apart.  His voice sounded too bright even to his own ears, and he had a little mental freak-out while he was waiting for his partner to reply where he couldn’t help but think _what is_ up _with me today?_

But Tessa didn’t seem to notice.  “Obviously,” she replied, and then she stuck her hand out for their secret handshake, which Scott was happy to complete.  

They had to go onto the ice not long after that, so Scott was forced to table his weird feeling about this day in order to focus on their practice; they’d had a great training week so far, and Scott didn’t want to mess it up on the last day.  

They started warm-ups with a few laps alone and finished with a few laps together, and right after their last lap, as they were leaning up against the boards for a water break, Charlie skated up to them with a wave and a smile.  

“Morning, guys,” he said, grinning.  

“Hey Charlie,” Scott responded.  “What’s up, man?” The feeling of deja-vu, which had been simmering all morning, suddenly seemed to get so strong that it was almost unbearable.  He made a quick grab for Tessa’s shoulder as he tried to keep himself upright, and hoped that Tess didn’t think he looked crazy.

“Are you and Tessa just going home for spring break still?” Charlie asked, and it was just a casual question, but there was something about it...something familiar...something...

“Yeah, I think so,” Tess replied, looking questioningly over at Scott.  

“Yeah,” Scott confirmed, trying to rearrange his face into a casual expression when he really felt like he was suddenly on the verge of an aneurysm.  “That’s the plan, at least. Why?”

“So I’ve got this uncle with a place up in the UP, and I asked him, like, months ago if I could borrow it for spring break this year, since we’ve got a whole week off.  And he said he didn’t know, maybe, he’d think about it, whatever. Well, he just called me up last night and said I could have it for the whole week! And then Meryl and I were talking about it this morning, and she and I were thinking, ‘Hey, it might be fun if Scott and Tessa came up, too.’  So what do you think? Are you guys interested?”

Scott cast a quick look over at Tess, and noticed that she was staring very deliberately at the lip of her water bottle, avoiding eye contact.  “I don’t know,” Scott replied slowly. He felt weird, like the top of his head was about to come off, like this stupid decision about spring break was the most important thing ever, all of a sudden.  “I mean, I already kind of had plans set up with Emily and my family. What do you think, T?”

“I have plans with family, too, yeah,” Tessa was quick to agree.  Her face was mostly impassive, but there was a tension around the edge of her eyes that Scott recognized as _bad news_.  “Sorry, Charlie.”  

“Hey, it’s whatever,” Charlie told her, shrugging it off easily.  “I know it was kind of last minute; I just wanted to put it out there.”  

“Okay, well thanks for the invite anyways,” Scott replied.  

He waited a few seconds for Charlie to skate off, and then he ducked down into Tessa’s space for an urgent super-secret meeting.  “Hey, did something about that feel kind of _weird_ to you, T?”

Tessa nodded, her expression pinched up.  “This whole morning’s felt weird to me,” she confessed with a frown.

Scott sighed with relief, glad he wasn’t the only one.  “Me too,” he told her. “But I feel a ton better now. Don’t you?”  

“Yeah,” Tessa agreed.  

They should’ve scooted apart after that and gone back to their water break, but they stayed frozen there instead, shoulders curled in toward one another and foreheads touching, Scott’s hand resting on her hip.  Scott could feel Tessa’s breath against his face, and when he looked up she was staring _right at him_ , her expression so weirdly open and happy that he didn’t know what to do with it.  

“Scott!  Tessa!” Marina shouted from across the ice, and they snapped apart.  

“Guess we’re up,” Scott muttered.  He pushed off from the boards and started making his way over toward Marina, and Tessa followed behind him.  

On the way out of practice that morning, Scott stopped Tessa in the parking lot before they went their separate ways.  “Hey, do you want to hang out over spring break?” he asked, feeling suddenly shy. “We could go catch a movie or something.”  

“Oh,” Tessa said, sounding like she was genuinely surprised, and Scott was suddenly backtracking.

“We don’t have to or anything, I know you’re gonna be busy with family, and we see enough of each other at the rink or whatever and…”

“No,” Tessa cut in, before he could get any further.  She set a hand on his arm and squeezed reassuringly. “No,” she repeated, “A movie would be nice, actually.”  

“Oh, okay,” Scott said.  He blew out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.  “It’s a plan, then.”

He walked back to his truck feeling like he’d just won the lottery.  

\--

It was just after 7 AM on an otherwise uneventful Friday when Scott threw back the door to their apartment looking like a frenzied mess.  Tessa was still exactly as he’d left her ten minutes ago, curled up in bed reading, her hair piled high on top of her head and the cup of coffee he’d made her steaming on the side table.  She looked up from her book and over in his direction, giving him a curious smile and an eyebrow raise for his trouble. “You’re supposed to be at the rink,” she observed.

“I forgot something,” Scott replied.  

“What?” Tessa asked him.

Unable to hold himself back for a second longer, Scott halfway-tackled his partner back into the pillows for a kiss so over-enthusiastic that he almost missed her mouth entirely.  He could feel it as Tessa laughed around his lips for a moment before drawing him in, her fingers sliding easily into his hair and her head tipping to the side to correct for his bad aim.  

Scott pulled away a long while later, hair askew and dress shirt rumpled.  “Forgot to kiss you goodbye,” he explained, somewhat unnecessarily.

Tessa shook her head at him like she just couldn’t believe it.  “What’s gotten into you?” she asked, but the edges of her eyes were crinkled up with happiness, so Scott knew she really didn’t mind.  “I’m going to meet you at the rink in less than two hours!”

“I just missed you,” Scott confessed.  And it was true; literally two blocks out from their driveway, he’d been struck by a feeling so strong that he’d absolutely _had_ to turn around.  “That’s all.” He picked himself up, straightened his shirt, and let himself look back at Tessa for one more second before he broke away.  “Okay, I’ve gotta go or I’m going to be _really_ late,” he announced, as though Tessa didn’t already know that.

“Bye, Scott!” Tessa called after him.  “I’ll see you soon.”

“Bye!” he called over his shoulder.  

Scott literally ran back down the stairs and out to his car, and he took a moment to prepare himself for the (frenzied, speeding-heavy) drive to the rink before he put the key into the ignition and turned the car on.  A Journey song was mid-play on the radio, and something about it sounded strangely familiar in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Scott shrugged, turned up the volume, and sang along as he pulled out onto the busy street.


End file.
